ArticleScientific reports2023
Spontaneous action matching in dog puppies, kittens and wolf pups.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Let's talk about "talking" dogs! Reviewing the science behind a bold idea.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Social learning in dogs from an ecologically valid perspective.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Watched or not: Overimitation in dogs under different attentional states.Learning & behavior · 2025Article
- After all, how valuable is the dog model for examining human socio-cognitive abilities?Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Familiar Dog or Familiar Person: Who Do Pet Dogs Best Synchronize with?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Evidence for the communicative function of human-directed gazing in 6- to 7-week-old dog puppies.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- 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
- Action observation reveals a network with divergent temporal and parietal cortex engagement in dogs compared with humans.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- The Power of Discourse: Associations between Trainers' Speech and the Responses of Socialized Wolves and Dogs to Training.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We investigated the spontaneous tendency of dog puppies, kittens and wolf pups to match their behaviour to actions demonstrated by a human, in the absence of food reward. Based on dogs' inherent sociality and domestication history, we predicted that the tendency to match human actions is more pronounced in this species than in the other two. To test this, we exposed N = 42 dog puppies, N = 39 kittens and N = 8 wolf pups to ostensive human demonstrations of an object-related action. We found that dog puppies paid more attention to the demonstration than kittens and wolf pups. Dog puppies and wolf pups matched the demonstrated actions in more trials than kittens. Dog puppies also tended to reproduce the human demonstration that differed from the action they typically preformed in the absence of demonstration. These results support that dog puppies show a tendency to attend to humans and conform their behaviour to human demonstrations in the absence of extrinsic food rewards. This spontaneous tendency is also relevant for practical applications, by providing the basis to devise puppy-training methods that rely less on food rewards, and instead exploit puppies' natural predisposition for social learning.
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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.