How Specific Are The Social Skills of Dogs?
… Studies of social cognition in dogs have had one common theme, which is that they all tested social cognition in the context of a communicative-cooperative task. But do dogs’ social skills extend beyond this narrow context? In non-communicative or non-cooperative social tasks, are dogs’ social skills otherwise unremarkable? The distinction is not trivial; social information comes in various forms beyond explicit communication. For example, various non-human primate species are known to alter their behavior when trying to steal food from a human, according to whether or not that human is watching them. This is surely a social problem, but one devoid of explicit communication or cooperation.
Two researchers with whom the regular reader of this blog should now be familiar, Victoria Wobber (who ran the bonobo testosterone study I mentioned in the review of Bonobo Handshake) and Brian Hare, wonder to what extent dogs can reason about the social world more broadly. Specifically, would their impressive social skills persist in a task that did not involve cooperative communication? They compared dogs and chimpanzees in two versions of a reversal learning task: non-social and social.