ArticleFrontiers in psychology2019
Free-Ranging Dogs Are Capable of Utilizing Complex Human Pointing Cues.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 59 citations in OpenAlex.
- Striking global similarities in dog-human interactions.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Social communicative characteristics of adolescent police dogs: Acquired experience plays a crucial role.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Treats or affection? Understanding reward preferences in Indian free-ranging dogs.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Dog-Stranger Interactions Can Facilitate Canine Incursion into Wilderness: The Role of Food Provisioning and Sociability.Biology · 2025Article
- Exploring dog and cat cohabitation within Japanese households.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dog-Owner Relationship and Its Association with Social Cognition in French Bulldogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Free-ranging dogs match a human's preference in a foraging task.Current zoology · 2024Article
- Article
- Street-wise dog testing: Feasibility and reliability of a behavioural test battery for free-ranging dogs in their natural habitat.PloS one · 2024Article
- Article
- Visual perception of emotion cues in dogs: a critical review of methodologies.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Function predicts how people treat their dogs in a global sample.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Research on the Ethology and Diet of the Stray Dog Population in the Areas Bordering the Municipality of Suceava, Romania.Veterinary sciences · 2023Article
- Wild skuas can follow human-given behavioural cues when objects resemble natural food.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Article
- Dogs functionally respond to and use emotional information from human expressions.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- Adjustment in the point-following behaviour of free-ranging dogs - roles of social petting and informative-deceptive nature of cues.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Effect of pitch range on dogs' response to conspecific vs. heterospecific distress cries.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Cooperative Communication with Humans Evolved to Emerge Early in Domestic Dogs.Current biology : CB · 2021Article
- Did Dog Domestication Contribute to Language Evolution?Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Dogs are one of the most common species to be found as pets and have been subjects of human curiosity, leading to extensive research on their socialization with humans. One of the dominant themes in dog cognition pertains to their capacity for understanding and responding to human referential gestures. The remarkable sociocognitive skills of pet dogs, while interacting with humans, is quite well established. However, studies regarding the free-ranging subpopulations are greatly lacking. The interactions of these dogs with humans are quite complex and multidimensional. For the first time, we tested 160 adult free-ranging dogs to understand their ability to follow relatively complex human referential gestures using dynamic and momentary distal pointing cues. We found that these dogs are capable of following distal pointing cues from humans to locate hidden food rewards. However, approximately half of the population tested showed a lack of tendency to participate even after successful familiarization with the experimental setup. A closer inspection revealed that anxious behavioral states of the individuals were responsible for such an outcome. Finally, we compared the results using data from an earlier study with dynamic proximal cues. We found that free-ranging dogs follow distal cues more accurately compared to proximal cue. We assume that life experiences with humans probably shape personalities of free-ranging dogs, which in turn influence their responsiveness to human communicative gestures.
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