Individual differences in cooperative communicative skills are more similar 
between dogs and humans than chimpanzees

MacLean, Evan L.; Herrmann, Esther; Suchindran, Sunil; Hare, Brian

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2017.01.005

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Individual differences in cooperative communicative skills are more similar between dogs and humans than chimpanzees

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons72749

Herrmann, Esther
Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society;
Minerva Research Group Human Origins of Self-Regulation, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

MacLean, E. L., Herrmann, E., Suchindran, S., & Hare, B. (2017). Individual differences in cooperative communicative skills are more similar between dogs and humans than chimpanzees. Animal Behaviour, 126, 41-51. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2017.01.005.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002C-92D2-1

Abstract

By 2.5 years of age humans are more skilful than other apes on a set of social, but not nonsocial, cognitive tasks. Individual differences in human infants, but not chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, are also explained by correlated variance in these cooperative communicative skills. Relative to nonhuman apes, domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, perform more like human infants in cooperative communicative tasks, but it is unknown whether dog and human cognition share a similar underlying structure. We tested 552 dogs in a large-scale test battery modelled after similar work with humans and nonhuman apes. Unlike chimpanzees, but similarly to humans, individual differences in dogs were explained by correlated variance in skills for solving cooperative communicative problems. Direct comparisons of data from all three species revealed similar patterns of individual differences in cooperative communication between human infants (N = 105) and domestic dogs (N = 430), which were not observed in chimpanzees (N = 106). Future research will be needed to examine whether the observed similarities are a result of similar psychological mechanisms and evolutionary processes in the dog and human lineages.