Abstract:

Insightful cognitive abilities as well as high cooperativity and “ultrasocial” emotional attitudes have been proposed to differentiate humans from other animal species. By definition, determining human uniqueness requires comparisons with non-human animals. Further on, comparative cognition contributes to a more complete understanding of human social life by informing us about its evolutionary origins. Firstly I will show results demonstrating that, in contrast with their initial perception as an artificial and human-controlled species, domestic dogs do not necessarily have inferior social cognitive abilities compared to primates, and even more, may represent a better model for human sociality. Dogs often show performance comparable to humans at the behavioural level but are mostly assumed to have less advanced cognitive abilities compared to humans. Consequently, human-like performance in dogs puts a high pressure on cognitive sciences to come up with various hypotheses about the potential underlying mechanisms, and as such, strongly facilitates the development of psychological theory.

Secondly, I will argue that, in parallel with traditional human and non-human primate comparisons, studying the behaviour of the domestic dog and its closest wild-living relative, the wolf provides a unique opportunity to learn about the evolutionary processes that might have been shaping also human cognition as well as about the functions of social behaviours. Behaviours found in humans and dogs but missing in wolves can be seen as phenotypic convergences and are likely to reflect the operation of adaptive processes. These behaviours have most likely been influenced by the domestication process during the course of which dogs have been selected for cooperating and communicating with humans – as it happened also during human evolution. The first results of comparing longitudinally at the Wolf Science Center how similarly socialized dogs and wolves communicate with conspecifics as well as with humans and read their behaviour indicate that domestication most likely effected both the cognitive abilities and the emotional attitudes of dogs. This seems to confirm the functionality of similarly intertwined cognitive and emotional features of humans that differentiate us from other primates.