Puppies Know What Pointing Means

The other day I was playing ball with my Standard Poodle, Raja. Ball is one of his favorite games. The rules are simple. He brings me the ball and expects me to pry it out of his teeth and throw it down the length of the kitchen. If I am being uncooperative about extracting the ball from his mouth, he will eventually let go of the ball so that it falls into my hand, and will nudge my hand with his nose, letting me know that I am being remiss in my part of the game. Occasionally I try to fool him, and throw the ball not into the kitchen, but into the living room.  By the time I do this, he has already run along part of the length of the kitchen, expecting to catch the ball. He stops and looks around in all directions, trying to see where the ball went, a puzzled expression on his face. I then relent and point to where I threw the ball. As soon as I point, he runs in that direction and quickly finds it.

I never knew how and when he caught on to my pointing. Now a recent study in the journal Animal Behaviour shows that puppies as young as 6 weeks old understand what pointing means (J. Riedel, K. Schumann, J. Kaminski, J. Call, and M. Tomasello, 2008, The early ontogeny of human-dog communication, Animal Behaviour 75: 1003-1014). The study did several experiments with groups of puppies that were 6-, 8-, 16-, and 24-weeks-old.  One of the experiments involved having one person hold on to the dog while another person sat in front of the dog and pointed and looked at one of two inverted cups where food had previously been placed. The other cup was empty, and both cups had been smeared with food to try to eliminate odor cues.  All of the puppies, including the 6-week-old ones, correctly chose some 80 percent of the time the cup that had the food and had been pointed to by the experimenter.

In another experiment, a visual marker was used. As before, there were two cups, one empty and one containing food. The experimenter showed the dog a visual marker, a black and white piece of wood, and then placed the marker on the cup with the food and looked at the marker while the dog was released to choose a cup. All the puppies did extremely well, getting the correct cup at better than 80 percent of the time, and the 24-week-old puppies scoring 100 percent correct on this experiment.

Prior to these experiments, other experiments with adult dogs showed that the dogs were quite good at picking up on pointing cues. What was a surprise was that dogs as young as 6-weeks were also able to respond to pointing. It suggests that the process of domestication must have selected for traits that allowed humans and dogs to communicate from the time the dogs were very young. Interestingly, neither wolves nor apes are very good at picking up on pointing cues provided by humans.  Although from a genetic standpoint wolves and dogs are very closely related, studies such as this one suggest that we cannot look to wolf behavior to help explain the behavior of our dogs.

--Con Slobodchikoff

Comments

[Kathleen Shade]

Hello,

Why does my dog try to cover any injuries I have on my body.I have a female pit-mix. She tries to cover them with a blanket then she lifts the blanket with her nose and smells the wound then tries to cover it again.