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In many studies that have investigated whether dogs' capacities to understand human pointing gestures are aspects of evolutionary or developmental social competences, family-owned dogs have been compared to shelter dogs. However, for most of these studies, the origins of shelter dogs were unknown. Some shelter dogs may have lived with families before entering shelters, and from these past experiences, they may have learned to understand human gestures. Furthermore, there is substantial variation in the methodology and analytic approaches used in such studies (e.g. different pointing protocols, different treatment of trials with no-choice response and indoor vs. outdoor experimental arenas). Such differences in methodologies and analysis techniques used make it difficult to compare results obtained from different studies and may account for the divergent results obtained. We thus attempted to control for several parameters by carrying out a test on dynamic proximal and distal pointing. We studied eleven kennel dogs of known origin that were born and raised in a kennels with limited human interaction. This group was compared to a group of eleven dogs comparable in terms of breed, sex and age that had lived with human families since they were puppies. Our results demonstrate that pet dogs outperform kennel dogs in their comprehension of proximal and distal pointing, regardless of whether trials where no-choice was made were considered as errors or were excluded from statistical analysis, meaning that dogs living in kennels do not understand pointing gestures. Even if genetic effects of the domestication process on human-dog relationships cannot be considered as negligible, our data suggest that dogs need to learn human pointing gestures and thus underscore the importance of ontogenetic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assessed how highly trained dogs respond to gestural versus verbal signals when their handlers or an unfamiliar person asked them to perform an obedience task. Dogs were requested to perform four different actions (“Sit”, “Down”, “Stay” and “Come”) upon receiving congruent (only gestural or only verbal) or incongruent signals (gestural and verbal signals contradict each other). The dogs’ performance measures were the frequency of correct responses and their response latency. Generalized Estimation Equation models were used to determine whether the type of signal, the coherence of the signals and familiarity with the signaler influenced dogs’ responses. Our results show that the probability of dogs expressing the requested behaviour was lower when the stranger gave verbal signals, than in any of the other conditions. In the incongruent condition, the probability that dogs expressed the behaviour indicated by the verbal signal was lower for signals provided by the stranger than for signals provided by the owner. The reverse was observed for gestural signals. In general, longer latencies to perform the “Come”, “Down” and “Sit” behaviours were observed in response to the stranger’s verbal signals than when the stranger gave gestural or incongruent signals. Additionally, the response latency to the stranger’s verbal stimuli took longer than verbal stimuli were provided by the owner in the case of “Come” (P = 0.002) and “Sit” (P < 0.001) actions. Our data support the argument that for highly trained dogs, gestural signals are less dependent upon signal-giver familiarity, whereas verbal signals are less effective when they are given by an unfamiliar person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assessed how water rescue dogs, which were equally accustomed to respond to gestural and verbal requests, weighted gestural versus verbal information when asked by their owner to perform an action. Dogs were asked to perform four different actions ('sit', 'lie down', 'stay', 'come') providing them with a single source of information (in Phase 1, gestural, and in Phase 2, verbal) or with incongruent information (in Phase 3, gestural and verbal commands referred to two different actions). In Phases 1 and 2, we recorded the frequency of correct responses as 0 or 1, whereas in Phase 3, we computed a 'preference index' (percentage of gestural commands followed over the total commands responded). Results showed that dogs followed gestures significantly better than words when these two types of information were used separately. Females were more likely to respond to gestural than verbal commands and males responded to verbal commands significantly better than females. In the incongruent condition, when gestures and words simultaneously indicated two different actions, the dogs overall preferred to execute the action required by the gesture rather than that required verbally, except when the verbal command 'come' was paired with the gestural command 'stay' with the owner moving away from the dog. Our data suggest that in dogs accustomed to respond to both gestural and verbal requests, gestures are more salient than words. However, dogs' responses appeared to be dependent also on the contextual situation: dogs' motivation to maintain proximity with an owner who was moving away could have led them to make the more 'convenient' choices between the two incongruent instructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: We tested horses on the impossible task paradigm, a drawback affecting the decision-making process in animals. We used the direction of the horse’s ear cup as an indicator of its visual attention in terms of visual selective attention when both ears were directed at the same target and the visual differential attention when the ears were directed differentially to the persons and to the experimental tools. We aimed to evaluate whether the latter behavior could be considered a possible support to solve the problem. The visual differential attention was the most frequent behavior when the resource was unreachable, which supports the view that this gesture could be linked to a request for help from humans to find the solution to the task. Our procedure proved to be a useful way to understand how horses try to attract human attention when they are in a restricted environment, a typical situation for horses living in stables. In order to explore the decision-making processes of horses, we designed an impossible task paradigm aimed at causing an expectancy violation in horses. Our goals were to verify whether this paradigm is effective in horses by analyzing their motivation in trying to solve the task and the mode of the potential helping request in such a context. In the first experiment, 30 horses were subjected to three consecutive conditions: no food condition where two persons were positioned at either side of a table in front of the stall, solvable condition when a researcher placed a reachable reward on the table, and the impossible condition when the food was placed farther away and was unreachable by the horse. Eighteen horses were used in the second experiment with similar solvable and impossible conditions but in the absence of people. We measured the direction of the horse’s ear cup as an indicator of its visual attention in terms of visual selective attention (VSA) when both ears were directed at the same target and the visual differential attention (VDA) when the ears were directed differentially to the persons and to the table. We also included tactile interaction toward table and people, the olfactory exploration of the table, and the frustration behaviors in the ethogram. In the first experiment, the VDA was the most frequent behavior following the expectancy violation. In the second experiment, horses showed the VDA behavior mostly when people and the unreachable resource were present at the same time. We speculate that the VDA could be a referential gesture aimed to link the solution of the task to the people, as a request for help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]