Dogs assess human competence from observation alone and use it to predict future behaviour

Abstract

One key aspect of social cognition is the ability to assess the competence of other agents and then use this information to predict future behaviour. Current research shows that humans assess competence in a highly sophisticated manner. Our species is capable of taking third-party, relative observations of agent's competencies and then using them to make future predictions about the different behaviours of a single agent. To date, few studies have examined if non-human animals show these same features of competence assessment. Here, we find suggestive evidence that domestic dogs can use third-party observations of the relative competence of humans (at throwing or kicking a ball) to predict how far an experimenter will propel a ball in the future. This was despite the actual behaviour produced at test (a fake throw or kick) being identical, and dogs needing to assign different, action-specific competencies to the same agent for these two behaviours. Dogs therefore appear to display four behavioural signatures of human competence judgement, which suggests that the ability to make sophisticated competence judgements may not be unique to humans.