The effects of domestication and ontogeny on cognition in dogs and wolves

Abstract

Cognition is one of the most flexible tools enabling adaptation to environmental variation. Living close to humans is thought to influence social as well as physical cognition of animals throughout domestication and ontogeny. Here, we investigated to what extent physical cognition and two domains of social cognition of dogs have been affected by domestication and ontogeny. To address the effects of domestication, we compared captive wolves (n = 12) and dogs (n = 14) living in packs under the same conditions. To explore developmental effects, we compared these dogs to pet dogs (n = 12) living in human families. The animals were faced with a series of object-choice tasks, in which their response to communicative, behavioural and causal cues was tested. We observed that wolves outperformed dogs in their ability to follow causal cues, suggesting that domestication altered specific skills relating to this domain, whereas developmental effects had surprisingly no influence. All three groups performed similarly in the communicative and behavioural conditions, suggesting higher ontogenetic flexibility in the two social domains. These differences across cognitive domains need to be further investigated, by comparing domestic and non-domesticated animals living in varying conditions.

Figure 1

Mean proportion of correct trials (including 95% confidence interval) of every group in the four cue conditions. The dashed line indicates the chance performance level, with performances above chance shown by asterisk above the confidence bar, whereas differences between groups are indicated by a line with asterisk positioned above the two groups (*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001).

Figure 2

Mean proportion of time (including 95% confidence interval) that the groups gazed at the testing table. Significant difference is indicated by asterisk (*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001).

Figure 3

The experimental set-up of the test.