ArticleScientific reports2023
Dogs outperform cats both in their testability and relying on human pointing gestures: a comparative study.
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 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social communicative characteristics of adolescent police dogs: Acquired experience plays a crucial role.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Side bias behaviour in dogs (Canis familiaris) is influenced by task complexity.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Effect of Gabapentin on the Efficiency of a Desensitization-Counter-Conditioning Claw-Trimming Protocol for Cats with Healthcare Phobias: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Crossover Trial.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Dog-Owner Relationship and Its Association with Social Cognition in French Bulldogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Editorial: How animals affect us: examining the influence of human-animal interactions on human's health.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The dog is a so far unique species to study interspecific communication and a promising evolutionary model for preverbal human communication. Recently cats were reported to show some similar skills to dogs. Here we directly compared both the testability and the success of companion dogs and cats in relying on human distal pointing gestures. Due to differences in their domestication, social and ecological background, and developmental processes, we expected better performance from dogs compared to cats. Using an object-choice task, cats made considerably fewer choices than dogs in the laboratory environment, and their tendency to make a choice declined during trials. They were slightly more testable at home, where their willingness to choose did not decrease over time. Dogs made more successful choices than cats, both at the group and individual level, irrespective of the type of the pointing gesture. Older cats were more successful. Despite the two species' rather similar role nowadays as human companions, our results support previous findings suggesting that, compared to the dog, the cat is a less ideal model to study some human communicative abilities in a laboratory environment.
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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.