During the process of domestication, dogs have had close social
contact with humans and thus may have evolved some skills for
interacting with us. Indeed, dogs present some human-like
social-communicative skills which raise the hypothesis of a
convergent cognitive evolution with humans (e.g. Miklosi et al.,
1998; Hare & Tomasello, 2005). As the face and facial
expressions are fundamental stimuli in human non-verbal
communication, it might be expected that the domestic dog could
also have a high sensitivity to human’s faces and even,
following the convergent cognitive evolution hypothesis,
manifest a human-like face processing strategy toward human’s
faces.
The aims of this project are:
- To investigate to what degree domestic dogs are sensitive to human faces and to human facial expressions.
- To assess whether dogs present human-like perceptual strategies for human face processing.
- To know if dogs use different strategies to process human and dog’s faces.
- To evaluate to what extent the potential sensitivity to faces in dogs can be generalise to the species by studying the eventual effects of breed.
- To analyse the development of the potential sensitivity to faces in dogs during the ontogeny and the domestication process.
Our investigations are based on a non invasive neuro-ethological approach. We assess the sensitivity to faces in dogs by observing their eye-movement (left or right) when they look at pictures of faces, which could reveal a specialisation of one brain hemisphere for face processing, as is the case in humans (right hemispherical dominance).
In this comparative study we are testing various groups of
participants with the same methodology: dogs (adults, puppies,
various breeds); humans (adults, children, infants) and
eventually adult wolves.
This project is a collaboration between the Department of
Psychology and the Department of Biological Sciences of the
University of Lincoln.
Hare B, Tomasello M (2005) Human-like social
skills in dogs? Trends Cognitive Science 9:439–444
Miklósi Á, Polgárdi R, Topál J, Csányi V (1998) Use of
experimenter given cues in dogs. Animal Cognition 1:113–121