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Domestic dogs conceal auditory but not visual information from others

Animal Cognition volume 16, pages 351–359 (2013)Cite this article

Abstract

A number of studies have shown that dogs are sensitive to a human’s perspective, but it remains unclear whether they use an egocentric strategy to assess what humans perceive. We investigated whether dogs know what a human can see and hear, even when the dogs themselves are unable to see the human. Dogs faced a task in which forbidden food was placed in a tunnel that they could retrieve by using their paw. Whereas the dogs could not see the experimenter during their food retrieval attempts, the experimenter could potentially see the dog’s paw. In the first experiment, dogs could choose between an opaque and a transparent side of the tunnel, and in the second experiment, they could choose between a silent and a noisy approach to the tunnel. The results showed that dogs preferred a silent approach to forbidden food but they did not hide their approach when they could not see a human present. We conclude that dogs probably rely on what they themselves can perceive when they assess what the human can see and hear.

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Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful to the dog owners who let their dogs participate in our study. We further thank Susanne Zachow, Helene Petterson, Diana Wiedemann, and Alexander Siller for helping with data collection. We also thank Kerstin Esau for coding for inter-observer reliability purposes.

Conflict of interest

We declare that the experiments comply with the current laws of Germany. We also declare that we have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz6, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

    Juliane Bräuer, Magdalena Keckeisen, Andrea Pitsch, Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call & Michael Tomasello

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  1. Juliane Bräuer
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  2. Magdalena Keckeisen
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  3. Andrea Pitsch
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  4. Juliane Kaminski
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  5. Josep Call
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  6. Michael Tomasello
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Correspondence to Juliane Bräuer.

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Bräuer, J., Keckeisen, M., Pitsch, A. et al. Domestic dogs conceal auditory but not visual information from others. Anim Cogn 16, 351–359 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-012-0576-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-012-0576-9

Keywords

  • Social cognition
  • Domestic dogs
  • Perspective taking