In humans the pointing gesture can take many forms in everyday life. Many independent studies have established that dogs comprehend the human pointing gesture and we showed that dogs are able to rely on more subtle human visual cues like head turning, nodding or bowing. Moreover they can generalize to a certain degree from familiar pointing gestures to unfamiliar ones, and thereby they can use also novel pointing gestures as a cue. In some cases dogs seem to regard the pointing gesture indeed as being a communicative act, as in the experimental setting they tended to choose the bowl pointed at by the human even when it was contradicted by direct olfactory or visual information.

We showed that the comprehension of the human pointing in dogs may require only very limited and rapid early learning to fully develop.

In a more recent study we found that although dogs perform well in the case of many different pointing gestures they perform poorly in the case of the gestures in which from the observer’s point of view the pointing arm and hand stays within the silhouette of the body. This result made us to conclude that for the dogs the protrusion of a body part of the body torso provides the key feature of the signal. Examining this question more closely in a very recent study we found that making the gesture visually more conspicuous could have an enhancing effect in cases where the gesture does not stick out from the body torso. On the basis of these results it seems that the most informative sign for the dogs is not even the line of the pointing arm but a clearly visible patch, which appears conspicuously and asymmetrically at one side of the body torso.

We have provided evidence that during the domestication process, selection for two factors under genetic influence (visual cooperation and focused attention) have led independently to increased comprehension of human communicational cues in dogs.

In a comparative study we revealed that 3-year-old children are able to rely on the direction of the index finger, and show the strongest ability to generalize to unfamiliar gestures. Although some capacity to generalize is also evident in younger children and dogs, especially the latter appear biased in the use of protruding body parts as directional signals.

There are also some indications that dogs have a strong propensity to initialize communicative interactions with humans by using visual and sometimes also acoustic signals functionally similar to the ones used by humans. Several studies have demonstrated that also dogs “point” to humans, e.g. when dogs when facing an unsolvable situation use attention-getting behaviour. For example, after looking at the owner, dogs display gaze alternation between the location of the target object and the owner. A similar phenomenon was observed in a separate experiment, in which dogs, after having learnt how to solve a task, were prevented to get the target object the same way. Characteristically, after a few attempts most dogs stopped trying and looked at their owner. According to the results of these studies gaze alternation is a typical sign of dogs’ “pointing behaviour”, and it proved to be also very effective in the sense that humans can extract the information of it about the actual location of something that the dog wants to obtain.

 

Further reading

Miklósi, Á., Polgárdi, R., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 1998. Use of experimenter-given cues in dogs. Animal Cognition, 1: 113-121. (pdf)

Soproni, K., Miklósi, Á., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2001. Comprehension of human communicative signs in pet dogs. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 115: 122-126. (pdf)

Szetei, V., Miklósi, Á., Topál, J., Csányi V. 2003. When dogs seem to lose their nose: an investigation on the use of visual and olfactory cues in communicative context between dog and owner. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 83: 141-152. (pdf)

Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi E., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Virányi, Zs., Csányi, V. 2003. A simple reason for a big difference: wolves do not look back at humans but dogs do. Current Biology, 13: 763-766. (pdf)

Virányi, Zs., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V. 2004. Dogs respond appropriately to cues of humans’ attentional focus. Behavioural Processes, 66: 161-172. (pdf)

Miklósi, Á., Soproni, K. 2006. A comparative analysis of animals' understanding of the human pointing gesture. Animal Cognition, 9: 81-93. (pdf)

Gácsi, M., Kara, E., Belényi, B., Topál, J., Miklósi, Á. 2009 The effect of development and individual differences in pointing comprehension of dogs. Animal Cognition, 12: 471-479. (pdf)

Lakatos, G., Soproni, K., Dóka, A., Miklósi, Á. 2009. A comparative approach to dogs’ (Canis familiaris) and human infants’ comprehension of various forms of pointing gestures. Animal Cognition, 12: 621-631. (pdf)

Gácsi, M., McGreevy, P., Kara, E., Miklósi, Á. 2009. Effects of selection for cooperation and attention in dogs. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 5: 31. (pdf)

Gácsi, M., Győri, B., Virányi, Zs., Kubinyi, E., Range, F., Belényi, B., Miklósi, Á. 2009. Explaining Dog Wolf Differences in Utilizing Human Pointing Gestures: Selection for Synergistic Shifts in the Development of Some Social Skills. PLoS ONE 4 (8): e6584. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone. 0006584.

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