Dog imitation and its possible origins

Abstract

The question of social learning in dogs is characterized by dispute. Ever since Thorndike more than a century ago, researchers believed that domestic dogs have poor social learning skills. However, recently it has been proposed that dogs have enhanced social cognitive skills due to their selection to live in the human environment and cooperative with humans. Thus, dogs might not just be able to learn through observation from conspecifics but also from humans. The most convincing argument for the latter assumption would be experimental evidence of true imitation, since imitation is considered to be the most complex and also most rare social learning mechanism in the animal kingdom. In this chapter, we will report recent evidence first of social facilitation and social influences on individual learning and then of true social learning in dogs. The latter includes three hallmarks of imitation: faithful copying (of both a human and a conspecific model), deferred imitation, and selective imitation. In the final part we address the potential origins of these remarkable skills of dogs. We propose imitation has been inherited from their ancestors, wolves, which are well known for their advanced social system, including cooperative breeding and hunting. This hypothesis has recently been supported by experimental evidence with wolves outperforming dogs in a manipulative problem-solving task after observation of a skilled conspecific.