Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
ELTE NAP Comparative Ethology Research Group, Budapest, Hungary.
Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 16;13(1):2094. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-28959-5.
We investigated the spontaneous tendency of dog puppies, kittens and wolf pups to match their behaviour to actions demonstrated by a human, in the absence of food reward. Based on dogs' inherent sociality and domestication history, we predicted that the tendency to match human actions is more pronounced in this species than in the other two. To test this, we exposed N = 42 dog puppies, N = 39 kittens and N = 8 wolf pups to ostensive human demonstrations of an object-related action. We found that dog puppies paid more attention to the demonstration than kittens and wolf pups. Dog puppies and wolf pups matched the demonstrated actions in more trials than kittens. Dog puppies also tended to reproduce the human demonstration that differed from the action they typically preformed in the absence of demonstration. These results support that dog puppies show a tendency to attend to humans and conform their behaviour to human demonstrations in the absence of extrinsic food rewards. This spontaneous tendency is also relevant for practical applications, by providing the basis to devise puppy-training methods that rely less on food rewards, and instead exploit puppies' natural predisposition for social learning.
我们研究了小狗、小猫和狼崽在没有食物奖励的情况下，自发地模仿人类行为的倾向。基于狗固有的社会性和驯化历史，我们预测这种物种比其他两种物种更倾向于模仿人类的行为。为了验证这一点，我们让 42 只小狗、39 只小猫和 8 只狼崽接触到与物体相关的人类示范动作。我们发现小狗比小猫和狼崽更关注示范。小狗和狼崽在更多的试验中模仿了示范动作，而小猫则没有。小狗也倾向于复制与它们在没有示范时通常执行的动作不同的人类示范。这些结果表明，小狗表现出一种倾向，即关注人类，并在没有外在食物奖励的情况下模仿人类的示范行为。这种自发的倾向也与实际应用有关，为设计依赖于食物奖励的小狗训练方法提供了基础，而是利用小狗对社会学习的自然倾向。
