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. 2025 Jun;53(2):171-182.
doi: 10.3758/s13420-024-00635-2. Epub 2024 Sep 26.

Watched or not: Overimitation in dogs under different attentional states

Louise Mackie  1 , Jeanne Trehorel  2 , Ludwig Huber  2
Affiliations

Watched or not: Overimitation in dogs under different attentional states

Louise Mackie et al. Learn Behav. 2025 Jun.

Abstract

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) have been documented to 'overimitate' humans - a form of social learning - by copying their causally-irrelevant actions. It is suggested that this behaviour results from social, affiliative motivations. Dogs have also been known to behave differently when they are being watched (or not) by humans, such as by following commands better (or worse). In this study, we tested whether dogs' copying behaviour would also be sensitive to their caregiver's attentional states. The subject's caregiver demonstrated irrelevant and relevant actions in the dot-touching overimitation task, then during trials the caregiver was either watching their dog or turned away. Our results revealed no difference in dogs' irrelevant-action copying; however, we found that dogs approached the dots less per trial when their caregiver was watching them. Dogs also copied their caregiver's leftward sliding of a door (to obtain a food reward) more accurately when they were being watched by their caregiver. Finally, dogs who copied the irrelevant action did so more often after obtaining their food reward, which supports that these dogs may have had two separate goals: a primary instrumental goal and a secondary social goal.

Keywords: Attentional states; Copying; Domestic dogs; Overimitation; Social learning.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethics approval: The ethics committee of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna approved this study and its procedures, in agreement with the good scientific practice and national legislation guidelines (ref: ETK-173/10/2022). Consent to participate/for publication: Written consent was obtained from the dogs’ caregivers for participation and publication. Additional informed consent was obtained from all individual participants for whom identifying information is included in this article. Conflicts of interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest nor financial interests. Open practices statement: Data and coding materials for the experiments reported here are available in the Open Science Framework (OSF) repository at: https://osf.io/dkbsg/ , and none of the experiments were preregistered.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The dot-touching overimitation task. On the left, examples of the caregiver’s position in each condition (watching and turned-away). On the top right, a dog modelling the touching of the yellow dot with her nose to copy part of the irrelevant action. On the bottom right, a dog modelling the sliding open of the food chamber door to copy part of the relevant action
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Results of the two ordinal mixed models for caregivers’ attentional states and dogs’ action scores. The left plot shows the number of times that dogs scored 0–4 for the irrelevant action in each condition (turned-away (orange)/watching (blue)); “ns” = not significant in the model. The right plot shows the number of times that dogs scored 0–4 for the relevant action in each condition (turned-away / watching); * = a significant effect in the model (p < .05). The vertical lines represent each model’s confidence intervals while the horizontal lines are each model’s fitted values. The circle size represents the number of times the corresponding score was scored by a dog
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The binomial mixed model’s significant interaction between condition and trial for approach (of the dots), visualised with means (Appendix D). The trial means of condition “ownerfacewall” are represented along an orange line and ‘ownerwatchdog’ along a blue line
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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