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Family Dog Project
 Eötvös Loránd University, Department of Ethology
Budapest, Hungary Dog Behaviour Research |
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The Family Dog Project Why the dog? A unique process: domestication for social competence
Many assume that studying dog-human communication offers a unique opportunity for our understanding the evolution of human communicational skills. This claim is based on the view that the dog can be regarded as unique among domesticates. In fact dogs were not only the firstly domesticated animal, but had from very early on a “special” relationship with humans. The transition from the wild state to the domesticated one changed the selective forces radically leading to the adaptive specialization of dogs to the human environment. It is increasingly assumed that many aspects of dog behaviour can be functionally analogue to the corresponding human trait. Since human environment is challenging for dogs by virtue of its complex social and cognitive nature, dogs had to develop human-compatible social behaviour traits including functional analogues of human communicational skills. Further reading Miklósi Á. (2007) Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition. Oxford University Press. Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., Gácsi, M., Dóka, A., Pongrácz, P., Kubinyi, E., Virányi Zs., Csányi, V. 2009. The dog as a model for understanding human social behavior. Advances in the study of animal behaviour, 39: 71-116.
Research Projects  Differences between hand-raised wolves and dogs indicate that social attraction, synchronizing behaviour and communicative abilities of dogs changed markedly during the process of domestication.
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 Attachment between dog and owner is analogous to that of a human infant and his/her caregiver. The development of attachment is not restricted to a “sensitive period”.More...
 Dogs are able to learn through observation both from humans and other dogs, also in cases when the goal of the activity is not evident.More...
 Dogs are very sensitive to human social cues which often mediate their learning about the environment.More...
 In order to find food, catch a prey, defend a territory or make a burrow wolves and dogs need to know something about the physical lows of their environment. Often such skills are also referred to as ecological cognition because they may differ among species. More...
 At the behavioural level dogs share many aspects of human personality traits. Some of these are associated with highly polymorphic genes.More...
 Ethology, in particular the study of dog behaviour, could provide important insights in the development of synthetic companions or embodied robots.More...
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Due to their domestication the dog became one of the most successful mammals in the last 20-40.000 years of biological evolution. Compared to its living ancestor the wolf, dogs are now more wide-spread on the Earth and live in far greater number. This achievement can be very likely attributed to the fact that the dog has joined to live in the human niche which allowed him access to new resources of food and protection. However this change in the evolution of the dog could have not been achieved without changes in the behaviour that made it able to adapt to the human social environment. Sharing their environment dogs interact with the humans in many ways and living in such a complex social environment is cognitively challenging. It is widely accepted that the adaptational demands of the highly organized social life have led to special socio-cognitive abilities in dogs. 
