There are many cases and definitions for social learning – in general we consider an act social learning, when there is a demonstrator, who does something, while at least one observer witnesses this action, and later the observer will do something similar to the demonstrator’s action, while without demonstration this similarity would be less likely.

Dogs are excellent subjects for examining both interspecific and within-species social learning. As dogs form well-working social units with humans, it is easy to use human demonstrators in particular tasks, where dogs should learn by observation from the humans’ actions. At the same time trained dog demonstrators can be used also for tasks, where we expect dogs to learn from each others exemplar.

In several experiments we found that dogs learn easily from humans in many tasks, like detouring a V-shaped fence, opening a problem box, or operating a two-action device. Dogs follow human actions also in the ‘Do as I do’ paradigm, where they show ability for generalization.

We have demonstrated that dogs are able to use social information provided by humans in problem solving situations. Naive dogs learn a detour task faster if they can observe a demonstrator making the detour. Moreover they can use socially provided information to overcome previously learned but now maladaptive behavioural routines. The results show that other factors, like social rank can influence the dogs’ performance in social learning tasks: high ranked (dominant) dogs learned more easily from a human demonstrator, while subordinate dogs learned much more effective from a dog demonstrator.

Finally, it seems that dogs have special kind of receptivity to behaviour cues of human „teaching” which process ensures efficient transfer of information, even when its content is cognitively ’non-transparent’, arbitrary and actually does not have any perceivable adaptive value at all.

 

Further reading

Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi, E., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2003. Interaction between individual experience and social learning in dogs. Animal Behaviour, 65: 595-603. (pdf)

Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á., Timár-Geng, K., Csányi, V. 2003. Preference for copying unambiguous demonstrations in dogs. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 117: 337-343. (pdf)

Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi, E., Gurobi, K., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2001. Social learning in dogs: The effect of a human demonstrator on the performance of dogs (Canis familiaris) in a detour task. Animal Behaviour, 62: 1109-1117. (pdf)

Topál, J., Byrne, R.W., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V. 2006. Reproducing human actions and action sequences: “Do as I Do!” in a dog. Animal Cognition, 9: 355-367. (pdf)

Kubinyi, E., Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á. 2009. Dog as a model for studying con- and heterospecific social learning. Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 4: 31-41. (pdf)

[back]