Overimitation in dogs

The project involves a comprehensive investigation of the tendency of dogs to "overimitate", that is, whether dogs imitate causally irrelevant or inefficient actions of humans. A novel experimental and methodological approach will be used. This human-like overimitation behavior appears to be due to the special dog-human relationship rather than a cognitive deficit and is related to dogs` understanding of human pointing gestures, reluctance to ignore misleading human cues, and interpretation of human cues as "honest" actions. The few experimental studies of overimitation in dogs require further controls and additional experimental designs to clarify the underlying mechanisms as well as the various influences on this peculiar behavior. From the literature and the (few) existing data, we can derive the following general (H) and specific (H1-H3) hypotheses: H. Dogs learn from humans by copying not only functional and relevant actions in a goal-directed, efficiency-based manner, but also by copying inefficient, non-functional, or causally opaque actions in a playful and/or normative manner due to social motivations. From this general hypothesis, the following three specific hypotheses (H1-H3) are derived: H1. An important factor determining the extent to which dogs copy irrelevant actions is the quality of the relationship between the dog and the demonstrating human. H2. The canine potential to overimitate is based on social motivations, not causal misunderstanding or obedience (normative reasons). H3. Overimitation has roots in both evolution (domestication) and development. If true, these hypotheses would offer a possible explanation for why dogs adapt so well to human social environments that allow them to understand human actions and flexibly adapt their behavior to human actions and signals in different contexts. The goal of this project is to accomplish this in six steps, with two studies for each of the three hypotheses H1-H3. We believe that the work environment is suitable to achieve this for the following reasons: We have (i) many years of experience and extensive knowledge of canine behavior, (ii) experience recruiting large numbers of dogs for cognitive testing, (iii) experience applying state-of-the-art methods and techniques such as touchscreen-based conditioning, static and mobile eye-tracking, 3D tracking, and fMRI in our laboratory with dogs, (iv) excellent collaborators for statistical data analysis and technical issues, and (v) close collaboration with leading researchers in the field of animal cognition.