ArticleLearning & behavior2020
Selective overimitation in dogs.
Article in Learning & behavior, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Popperian Dogs-Practical Rationality and Inferential Reasoning in Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- Hierarchy-Dependent Behaviour of Dogs in the Strange Situation Test: High-Ranking Dogs Show Less Stress and Behave Less Friendly with a Stranger in the Presence of Their Owner.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Watched or not: Overimitation in dogs under different attentional states.Learning & behavior · 2025Article
- Social learning in dogs from an ecologically valid perspective.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Done deal-cohabiting dominant and subordinate dogs differently rely on familiar demonstrators in a detour task.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Body Awareness Does Not Need a Pedigree: Mixed-Breed Dogs Rely More on Self-Representation Than Social Learning in a Spatial Task.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Dogs with prior experience of a task still overimitate their caregiver.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Domestic dogs as a comparative model for social neuroscience: Advances and challenges.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Free-ranging dogs match a human's preference in a foraging task.Current zoology · 2024Article
- Behavioural Synchronisation between Dogs and Humans: Unveiling Interspecific Motor Resonance?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
- Kea, bird of versatility. Kea parrots (Journal of ornithology · 2024Article
- Action observation reveals a network with divergent temporal and parietal cortex engagement in dogs compared with humans.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Body size awareness matters when dogs decide whether to detour an obstacle or opt for a shortcut.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Functionally analogous body- and animacy-responsive areas are present in the dog (Canis familiaris) and human occipito-temporal lobe.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Would You Detour with Me? Association between Functional Breed Selection and Social Learning in Dogs Sheds Light on Elements of Dog-Human Cooperation.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Does owner handedness influence paw preference in dogs?Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Socially priming dogs in an overimitation task.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Article
- Overimitation in Dogs: Is There a Link to the Quality of the Relationship with the Caregiver?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Carry-over effects of tool functionality and previous unsuccessfulness increase overimitation in children.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Dogs have not only shown different kinds of social learning, from either conspecifics or humans, including do-as-I-do imitation, deferred imitation, and selective imitation, but in two previous studies they have also shown an eagerness to copy causally irrelevant actions. This so-called overimitation is prevalent in humans but is totally absent in great apes. Whereas in one of two previous studies dogs copied actions from an experimenter (Johnston, Holden, & Santos in Developmental Science, 20, e12460, 2017), in the other a reasonable number of the dogs copied the irrelevant actions from their human caregiver (Huber, Popovová, Riener, Salobir, & Cimarelli in Learning & Behavior, 46, 387-397, 2018). Dogs have not only been domesticated to live and work with us, but many companion dogs develop strong affiliative relationships with their caregiver, which are akin to the attachment bonds between human children and their mother. We therefore assumed that overimitation in dogs might be strongly motivated by social factors, such as affiliation or conformity. To test this hypothesis, we confronted dogs with the same demonstration of causally relevant and irrelevant actions as in the previous study (Huber et al. in Learning & Behavior, 46, 387-397, 2018), but this time with an unfamiliar experimenter instead of the caregiver as the demonstrator. The results strongly supported our hypothesis: Whereas half of the subjects in the previous study replicated the causally irrelevant action demonstrated by their caregiver, only very few did so when the actions were demonstrated by the experimenter. We conclude that the eagerness of dogs to learn from humans and to copy even unnecessary actions is strongly facilitated by their relationship with the particular human.
Indexed as
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31975325What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.