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Science 4 September 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5945, pp. 1269 - 1272
DOI: 10.1126/science.1176960
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Reports

Differential Sensitivity to Human Communication in Dogs, Wolves, and Human Infants

József Topál,1,* György Gergely,2 Ágnes Erdohegyi,3 Gergely Csibra,2 Ádám Miklósi3

Ten-month-old infants persistently search for a hidden object at its initial hiding place even after observing it being hidden at another location. Recent evidence suggests that communicative cues from the experimenter contribute to the emergence of this perseverative search error. We replicated these results with dogs (Canis familiaris), who also commit more search errors in ostensive-communicative (in 75% of the total trials) than in noncommunicative (39%) or nonsocial (17%) hiding contexts. However, comparative investigations suggest that communicative signals serve different functions for dogs and infants, whereas human-reared wolves (Canis lupus) do not show doglike context-dependent differences of search errors. We propose that shared sensitivity to human communicative signals stems from convergent social evolution of the Homo and the Canis genera.

1 Research Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1132 Budapest, Hungary.
2 Department of Philosophy, Central European University, 1051 Budapest, Hungary.
3 Department of Ethology, Eötvös University, 1117 Budapest, Hungary.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: topaljozsef{at}gmail.com

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Response to Comment on "Infants' Perseverative Search Errors Are Induced by Pragmatic Misinterpretation".
J. Topal, M. Toth, G. Gergely, and G. Csibra (2009)
Science 325, 1624
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Like Infant, Like Dog.
M. Tomasello and J. Kaminski (2009)
Science 325, 1213-1214
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)