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Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior pp 101–131Cite as

Social Looking in the Domestic Dog

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Abstract

The study of dog social cognition is relatively recent and is rapidly developing, providing an interesting and multi-faceted picture of our “best friend’s” sociocognitive abilities. In particular, since Miklósi et al.'s (2003) seminal work “A simple reason for a big difference: wolves do not look back at humans, but dogs do”, there has been a surge of interest in the area of dog–human communication. In the current chapter we focus on dogs’ comprehension of the human gaze and their ability to use human-directed-gazing as a communicative tool. We first review studies on the social significance of human eye contact for dogs, their understanding of eyes as indicators of attention, and their ability to take another’s visual perspective into account. We also consider dogs’ understanding of human eye-gaze as a communicative act, in terms of its potentially referential nature and as an ostensive cue signalling the communicative intent of the actor. We then move on to review studies on dogs’ human-directed gazing behaviour, discussing whether it may be considered part of an intentional and referential communicative act, what the underlying motivations and contexts in which this behaviour is exhibited may be, and what variables affect its occurrence. Where open questions remains, we outline current debates and highlight potential directions for future research.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the owners and their dogs that participated as volunteers in our studies. A special thanks to Paola Valsecchi, Isabella Merola, Chiara Passalacqua, Lara Tomaleo, Martina Lazzaroni, and Elisa Colombo for their contribution in many of the studies cited above. Thanks to Alexandra Horowitz for inviting us to contribute to this book. Sarah Marshall-Pescini was supported from grants from the University of Milan and funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement n. [311870]. Last but not least we thank our dogs Laika, Mago and Tika for participating as pilot subjects in planning our studies at the “Canis sapiens Lab”.

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  1. Dipartimento di Fisiopatologia Medico-Chirurgica e dei Trapianti, Sezione di Neuroscienze, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via F.lli Cervi 93, 20090, Segrate, MI, Italy

    Emanuela Prato-Previde & Sarah Marshall-Pescini

  2. Comparative Cognition, Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Sarah Marshall-Pescini

  3. Wolf Science Centre, Ernstbrunn, Austria

    Sarah Marshall-Pescini

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  1. Emanuela Prato-Previde
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  2. Sarah Marshall-Pescini
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Correspondence to Emanuela Prato-Previde .

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  1. Department of Psychology, Columbia University Barnard College, New York, New York, USA

    Alexandra Horowitz

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Prato-Previde, E., Marshall-Pescini, S. (2014). Social Looking in the Domestic Dog. In: Horowitz, A. (eds) Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-53994-7_5

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