Going back to "basics": Harlow's learning set task with wolves and dogs.

To survive and reproduce, animals need to behave adaptively by adjusting their behavior to their environment, with learning facilitating some of these processes. Dogs have become a go-to model species in comparative cognition studies, making our understanding of their learning skills paramount at multiple levels, not only with regards to basic research on their cognitive skills and the effects of domestication, but also with applied purposes such as training. In order to tackle these issues, we tested similarly raised wolves and dogs in a serial learning task inspired by Harlow's "learning set.

The Power of Discourse: Associations between Trainers' Speech and the Responses of Socialized Wolves and Dogs to Training.

In a previous study, we found that Positive Reinforcement Training reduced cortisol of wolves and dogs; however, this effect varied across trainer-animal dyads. Here we investigate whether and how the trainers' use of speech may contribute to this effect. Dogs' great interest in high-pitched, intense speech (also known as Dog Directed Speech) has already been reported, but whether and how wolves respond similarly/differently to voice characteristics has never been studied before.

Selective responding to human ostensive communication is an early developing capacity of domestic dogs.

Ostensive communication, communication motivated not only by an informative intention, but also by an intention to make this informative intention overt, is thought to be restricted to human signalers and to rely on metacognitive skills. On the receiver side, human infants and dogs have been found to selectively respond to human ostensive communication, even if it remains unclear whether they are able to discern the underlying intentions. At present only animals with extensive experiences with humans have demonstrated a response to human attention calling, suggesting that this sensitivity may be an exaptation of communicative skills allowing for context-specific responding to intraspecific signals.

Pet dogs' Behavioural Reaction to Their Caregiver's Interactions with a Third Party: Join in or Interrupt?

Pet dogs are promising candidates to study attachment-related and potentially jealousy-like behaviours in non-human animals, as they form a strong and stable bond with their human caregivers who often engage in affiliative interactions with diverse social partners. Nevertheless, it is still debated whether non-human animals are capable of experiencing such complex emotions. Even though caregivers frequently report observations of jealousy-like behaviours in dogs, behavioural studies in dogs have thus far led to contradictory results.

How to improve data quality in dog eye tracking.

Pupil-corneal reflection (P-CR) eye tracking has gained a prominent role in studying dog visual cognition, despite methodological challenges that often lead to lower-quality data than when recording from humans. In the current study, we investigated if and how the morphology of dogs might interfere with tracking of P-CR systems, and to what extent such interference, possibly in combination with dog-unique eye-movement characteristics, may undermine data quality and affect eye-movement classification when processed through algorithms. For this aim, we have conducted an eye-tracking experiment with dogs and humans, and investigated incidences of tracking interference, compared how they blinked, and examined how differential quality of dog and human data affected the detection and classification of eye-movement events.

Secure base effect in former shelter dogs and other family dogs: Strangers do not provide security in a problem-solving task.

Domestic dogs display behavioural patterns towards their owners that fulfil the four criteria of attachment. As such, they use their owners as a secure base, exploring the environment and manipulating objects more when accompanied by their owners than when alone. Although there are some indications that owners serve as a better secure base than other human beings, the evidence regarding a strong owner-stranger differentiation in a manipulative context is not straightforward.

Wolves, dogs and humans in regular contact can mutually impact each other's skin microbiota.

In contrast to humans and dogs, the skin microbiota of wolves is yet to be described. Here, we investigated the skin microbiota of dogs and wolves kept in outdoor packs at the Wolf Science Center (WSC) via 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Skin swab samples were also collected from human care takers and their pet dogs.

Individual and group level personality change across the lifespan in dogs.

In humans, age-related changes in personality occur in a non-random fashion with respect to their direction, timing, and magnitude. In dogs, there are still gaps in our knowledge about the detailed dynamics of age-related personality changes. We analysed the personality of 217 Border collies aged from 0.

Behavioural and cognitive changes in aged pet dogs: No effects of an enriched diet and lifelong training.

Dogs demonstrate behavioural changes and cognitive decline during aging. Compared to laboratory dogs, little is known about aging in pet dogs exposed to different environments and nutrition. In this study, we examined the effects of age, an enriched diet and lifelong training on different behavioural and cognitive measures in 119 pet dogs (>6yrs).

Partial rewarding during clicker training does not improve naïve dogs' learning speed and induces a pessimistic-like affective state.

Clicker training is considered a welfare-friendly way of teaching novel behaviors to animals because it is mostly based on the positive reinforcement. However, trainers largely vary in their way of applying this training technique. According to the most, a reward (e.

Comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris).

Dogs live in 45% of households, integrated into various human groups in various societies. This is certainly not true for wolves. We suggest that dogs' increased tractability (meant as individual dogs being easier to control, handle and direct by humans, in contrast to trainability defined as performance increase due to training) makes a crucial contribution to this fundamental difference.

Dogs wait longer for better rewards than wolves in a delay of gratification task: but why?

Self-control has been shown to be linked with being cooperative and successful in humans and with the g-factor in chimpanzees. As such, it is likely to play an important role in all forms of problem-solving. Self-control, however, does not just vary across individuals but seems also to be dependent on the ecological niche of the respective species.

Correction: Personality traits in companion dogs-Results from the VIDOPET.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Training pet dogs for eye-tracking and awake fMRI.

In recent years, two well-developed methods of studying mental processes in humans have been successively applied to dogs. First, eye-tracking has been used to study visual cognition without distraction in unrestrained dogs. Second, noninvasive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used for assessing the brain functions of dogs in vivo.

Wolves lead and dogs follow, but they both cooperate with humans.

Due to their convergent evolution, dogs have been suggested as a good model for the evolution of human social skills, such as tolerance and cooperativeness. However, recent studies have revealed that wolves (dogs' closest undomesticated relatives) are more tolerant and cooperative with conspecifics than dogs. It is still possible, though, that selection during domestication enhanced cooperative inclinations specifically towards humans, predicting better cooperation with humans in dogs than in wolves.

Effect of Age and Dietary Intervention on Discrimination Learning in Pet Dogs.

Aging is associated with a decline in cognitive functions such as learning, memory, attention, cognitive flexibility, and executive functions. Recent evidence indicates that interventions such as exercise, diet and cognitive training can be used to reduce the rate of age-dependent cognitive decline. In this study, we examined the changes in discrimination learning in older pet dogs, tested whether a dietary intervention counteracts a potential decline in learning and evaluated the influence of lifelong training on learning speed and cognitive flexibility.

The effect of domestication on post-conflict management: wolves reconcile while dogs avoid each other.

Highly cooperative social species are expected to engage in frequent reconciliation following conflicts in order to maintain pack cohesiveness and preserve future cooperation. By contrast, in social species with low reliance on cooperation, reconciliation is expected to be less frequent. Here, we investigate the pattern of reconciliation in four captive wolf packs and four captive dog packs.

In wolves, play behaviour reflects the partners' affiliative and dominance relationship.

Puppy packs (consisting of only puppies) and mixed-age packs (composed of puppies and adults) were observed to test whether social play can be used for assessing and establishing social relations in wolves, . Differently from previous studies, we looked at play behaviours in detail, allowing us to categorize play interactions as either competitive or relaxed, and predicted that different types of play would be associated with different relationships between individuals. We found that the more time dyads spent in relaxed play, the more affiliative interactions they exchanged outside of play.

Dog-Owner Attachment Is Associated With Oxytocin Receptor Gene Polymorphisms in Both Parties. A Comparative Study on Austrian and Hungarian Border Collies.

Variations in human infants' attachment behavior are associated with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene, suggesting a genetic component to infant-mother attachment. However, due to the genetic relatedness of infants and their mothers, it is difficult to separate the genetic effects of infants' OXTR genotype from the environmental effects of mothers' genotype possibly affecting their parental behavior. The apparent functional analogy between child-parent and dog-owner relationship, however, offers a way to disentangle the effects of these factors because pet dogs are not genetically related to their caregivers.

Personality traits in companion dogs-Results from the VIDOPET.

Individual behavioural differences in pet dogs are of great interest from a basic and applied research perspective. Most existing dog personality tests have specific (practical) goals in mind and so focused only on a limited aspect of dogs' personality, such as identifying problematic (aggressive or fearful) behaviours, assessing suitability as working dogs, or improving the results of adoption. Here we aimed to create a comprehensive test of personality in pet dogs that goes beyond traditional practical evaluations by exposing pet dogs to a range of situations they might encounter in everyday life.

Context and Individual Characteristics Modulate the Association between Oxytocin Receptor Gene Polymorphism and Social Behavior in Border Collies.

Recent studies suggest that the relationship between endogenous oxytocin and social affiliative behavior can be critically moderated by contextual and individual factors in humans. While oxytocin has been shown to influence human-directed affiliative behaviors in dogs, no study investigated yet how such factors moderate these effects. Our study aimed to investigate whether the context and the dogs' individual characteristics moderate the associations between the social affiliative (greeting) behavior and four single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the oxytocin receptor () gene.

Gaze-Following and Reaction to an Aversive Social Interaction Have Corresponding Associations with Variation in the OXTR Gene in Dogs but Not in Human Infants.

It has been suggested that dogs' remarkable capacity to use human communicative signals lies in their comparable social cognitive skills; however, this view has been questioned recently. The present study investigated associations between oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) polymorphisms and social behavior in human infants and dogs with the aim to unravel potentially differential mechanisms behind their responsiveness to human gaze. Sixteen-month-old human infants ( = 99) and adult Border Collie dogs ( = 71) participated in two tasks designed to test (1) their use of gaze-direction as a cue to locate a hidden object, and (2) their reactions to an aversive social interaction (using the still face task for children and a threatening approach task for dogs).

Importance of a species' socioecology: Wolves outperform dogs in a conspecific cooperation task.

A number of domestication hypotheses suggest that dogs have acquired a more tolerant temperament than wolves, promoting cooperative interactions with humans and conspecifics. This selection process has been proposed to resemble the one responsible for our own greater cooperative inclinations in comparison with our closest living relatives. However, the socioecology of wolves and dogs, with the former relying more heavily on cooperative activities, predicts that at least with conspecifics, wolves should cooperate better than dogs.