Making inferences about the location of hidden food: Social dog, causal ape.

TLDR

The study discusses how apes’ adaptations for complex, extractive foraging and dogs’ domestication-driven cooperative communication with humans contextualize the observed differences. The authors aimed to test whether dogs excel at using human communicative cues like pointing, while apes excel at using physical, causal cues such as noisy food in a cup. They tested domestic dogs and great apes on object choice tasks where hidden food locations were indicated by communicative, behavioral, or physical cues. Results strongly supported the social‑dog, causal‑ape hypothesis, showing dogs outperformed apes with human cues and apes outperformed dogs with physical cues.

Abstract

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and great apes from the genus Pan were tested on a series of object choice tasks. In each task, the location of hidden food was indicated for subjects by some kind of communicative, behavioral, or physical cue. On the basis of differences in the ecologies of these 2 genera, as well as on previous research, the authors hypothesized that dogs should be especially skillful in using human communicative cues such as the pointing gesture, whereas apes should be especially skillful in using physical, causal cues such as food in a cup making noise when it is shaken. The overall pattern of performance by the 2 genera strongly supported this social-dog, causal-ape hypothesis. This result is discussed in terms of apes' adaptations for complex, extractive foraging and dogs' adaptations, during the domestication process, for cooperative communication with humans.