While of course I recommend you pick up a copy of the current Bark — which includes great pieces on fear-aggression (Nicholas Dodman), training scent-detection dogs (Cat Warren), complicated pit bulls (Bronwen Dickey), whether our dogs make us more appealing (Karen London), and more — my article, What’s the Point is available online here for all.
In ‘What’s the Point?’ my article in this summer’s issue of The Bark magazine, I review (1) why we care how dogs attend to this gesture, (2) what causes dogs to attend to this gesture (the nature/nurture questions), and (3) what does it mean to be a dog who understands pointing (it doesn’t necessarily mean for them what it means for us).
This little phenomenon—dog attention to our gestures—deserves much more than a passing sentence. How dogs respond to our gestures has attracted considerable attention from research groups around the globe because it seems to be one of the core, underlying features of our relationship with dogs. Pointing has received so much attention that research groups studying dog social cognition could easily be renamed “Pointing Centers.”
Children and dogs perform equally well on pointing studies when the kid participants are two years old and younger. Three-year-old children, however, do much better than dogs on such tests. It likely has to do with the emergence of certain language skills in young humans. Other studies indicate the part of the brain that handles visual cues also processes language.
“To determine the age at which domestic dogs first show the ability to understand human pointing cues, we tested puppies in their human caregivers homes when the puppies were 9–24 weeks old,” Dorey and her team wrote. “We found little evidence that puppies younger than 21 weeks had the ability to follow human pointing gestures.”
The fourth and final test was what the researchers called the “unsolvable task.” For this trial the researchers presented puppies with progressively more difficult to access treats inside a plastic container. Eventually the researchers made it impossible to get the food out to see if the puppy might look to the nearby human for help—a behavior that has been well-documented in adult dogs. In this trial the puppies mostly ignored the nearby person, only looking for an average of about one second, suggesting that puppies aren’t born with an instinct to look to humans for help but rather learn that behavior as they interact more with our species.
Finding a genetic basis for dogs’ social intelligence fills in a big unknown in the story of how they became domesticated and could one day help breed better service dogs—which need to be whizzes at reading human cues, says Evan MacLean, a comparative psychologist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study.
“They’re adorable and it’s fun to work with them,” says MacLean. “But they’re puppies, they have short attention spans and they pee and poop on everything. At the start of this project, it was like, ‘Puppies!’ And by the end it was, ‘Puppies.’”
The researchers also made sure the pups weren’t just following their noses by taping a bit of kibble inside both cups to ensure they both had the smell of a treat and by conducting what they called an “odor control” test that involved no pointing. The dogs only got around 49 percent of their guesses correct in this test, suggesting the human gestures were the deciding factor in their improved accuracy in the other trials.
MacLean says that despite being just eight weeks old on average, the puppies could follow human gestures about as well as adult dogs. Moreover, each furry test subject had to perform the task upwards of 12 times and their cup-picking accuracy stayed quite consistent from the first trial to the last, meaning they didn’t improve with experience. “However they’re solving this problem they’re doing it above chance from the first exposure and they’re not getting better across time,” says MacLean. “That says they’re ready to do this and don’t need to learn it.”
Husky Proves Dogs Understand Pointing Gestures! | Intelligence Test
Dogs’ ability to understand us and to respond to our attempts to communicate with them has long been considered a fundamental part of the close relationship we share. More than two decades ago, researchers first provided evidence that dogs can follow human pointing gestures.
Many studies have since shown that when humans point at one of a pair of identical objects to indicate the location of food, dogs respond by choosing the one that’s pointed at more often than we would expect by chance. This may sound like a simple ability, but perhaps that’s because it’s so simple for us. The idea that another species can also respond to our pointing is a big deal.
As happens with any meaningful discovery, this topic has been extensively debated. Questions about the behavior largely revolve around whether dogs learn what this gesture means because they spend so much time with us or whether they have a natural ability to understand that pointing is a way to direct their attention to something of interest.
For both practical and ethical reasons, this is a tricky thing to study. Most adult dogs have a lot of experience with humans. To raise dogs without such contact for the purposes of a scientific study would be cruel and totally unacceptable. It would also be futile, because such dogs would be so poorly socialized and so fearful that they would not be able to participate in studies. Puppies, however, are another matter.