Wolf Science Center, Domestication Lab, Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology, University of Veterinary Medicine, Savoyenstraße 1a, 1160, Vienna, Austria.
Comparative Cognition, Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine, Medical University of Vienna, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Anim Cogn. 2020 May;23(3):443-453. doi: 10.1007/s10071-020-01346-7. Epub 2020 Feb 14.
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. With dogs having been selected to live in the human environment, several domestication hypotheses have predicted that dogs are better at self-control and thus more tolerant of longer delays than wolves. Here we set out to test this prediction by comparing dogs' and wolves' self-control abilities using a delay of gratification task where the animals had to wait for a predefined delay duration to exchange a low-quality reward for a high-quality reward. We found that in our task, dogs outperformed the wolves waiting an average of 66 s vs. 24 s in the wolves. Food quality did not influence how long the animals waited for the better reward. However, dogs performed overall better in motivation trials than the wolves, although the dogs' performance in those trials was dependent on the duration of the delays in the test trials, whereas this was not the case for the wolves. Overall, the data suggest that selection by humans for traits influencing self-control rather than ecological factors might drive self-control abilities in wolves and dogs. However, several other factors might contribute or explain the observed differences including the presence of the humans, which might have inhibited the dogs more than the wolves, lower motivation of the wolves compared to the dogs to participate in the task and/or wolves having a better understanding of the task contingencies. These possible explanations need further exploration.
自我控制能力已被证明与人类的合作能力和成功有关，也与黑猩猩的 g 因素有关。因此，它很可能在解决所有形式的问题中发挥重要作用。然而，自我控制能力不仅在个体之间存在差异，而且似乎还取决于物种的生态位。由于狗被选择生活在人类环境中，一些驯化假说预测狗具有更好的自我控制能力，因此比狼更能忍受更长的延迟。在这里，我们通过比较狗和狼在延迟满足任务中的自我控制能力来检验这一预测，在这个任务中，动物必须等待预先设定的延迟时间，才能用低质量的奖励换取高质量的奖励。我们发现，在我们的任务中，狗的表现优于狼，平均等待时间为 66 秒，而狼的等待时间为 24 秒。食物质量不影响动物等待更好奖励的时间。然而，狗在动机试验中的表现总体上优于狼，尽管狗在这些试验中的表现取决于测试试验中延迟的持续时间，而狼则不是这样。总的来说，数据表明，人类对影响自我控制的特征的选择，而不是生态因素，可能会导致狼和狗的自我控制能力。然而，其他一些因素可能也起到了作用或解释了观察到的差异，包括人类的存在，这可能比狼更抑制了狗，与狗相比，狼参与任务的动机较低，或者狼对任务的偶然事件有更好的理解。这些可能的解释需要进一步探索。
