Dog owners might not be too impressed when they’re able to point out a fallen piece of chicken or a thrown stick to their pooch, but dogs’ ability to follow that seemingly simple gesture places them in rare air in the animal kingdom. Some research suggests that even chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relatives, don’t understand pointing as well as dogs. For decades, researchers have debated whether dogs obtain their ability to understand pointing by spending time with humans and learning it or if our furry companions are born with a capacity to comprehend this deceptively complex feat of communication.
Now, a study—published in June 2021 in the journal Current Biology—finds that even 8-week-old puppies with little exposure to humans can understand pointing and show sophisticated levels of social cognition in other tests. On top of that, the study found that each fluffball’s genetic makeup was a strong predictor of its ability to follow a pointed finger to a hidden treat as well as the pup’s tendency to pay attention to human faces.
The team behind the study had two main questions. The first was whether young puppies who had yet to spend any significant time with humans were sensitive to human attempts to communicate. The second was whether there was a genetic basis for the puppies’ social smarts.
They tested 375 pups between 8-10 weeks of age (the average age was 8 weeks), who until then had spent most all of their time with their moms and litter-mates. The tests involved considerable janitorial duties on the part of the researchers, as those pups peed and pooped with abandon.
In regard to the tests, the puppies performed at levels significantly above chance from the outset, but showed no improvement over time:
“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.”
According to Monique Udell, a psychologist studying human-animal interactions at Oregon State University who was not involved in this research, this study is the first to show, with a large group of dogs and with known levels of relatedness between them, that the animals don’t have to acquire these traits through learning and that some forms of social cognition do indeed have a substantial genetic component.
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