Is dogs’ heritable performance in socio-cognitive tasks truly social?

Abstract

Recently, Bray et al. (2021) showed that behavioural performance in cognitive tasks involving humans is highly heritable in dog puppies. Although the paper shows substantial heritability of specific behavioural traits, the absence of control conditions does not allow for strong support of the authors’ claim that the cognitive performance they measured represents a special sensitivity to human cooperative-communicative acts.