Another Sciam post from the ever amusing Jesse Bering. Here he takes a long look at dog social cognition - particularly the extraordinary ability of pet dogs to interpret cues like pointing from humans. Stray dogs, he muses, who have been stray, clearly, for generations, display different social cognition to beloved pets. So what is the default condition for dog social cognition? He refers to a series of experiments using human pointing cues with stray dogs on the one hand, and pet dogs on the other and comments that the former category could only reliably correctly interpret less ambiguous cues like a finger pointing to a source of food barely centimetres from its tip. Is the acute social cognition of pet dogs a developmental attribute after all, rather than some evolutionary quirk of the dog brain arrived at through thousands of years of domestication? Although Jesse mentions Brian Hare's research he neglects what might be an important finding of Hares' - that dogs in New Guinea, which had been domesticated but then had returned to a feral condition, appeared to have lost a great deal of the sharpness of social cognition displayed by human commensal dogs. In other words, evolution had rapidly acted to reverse the functional analogue of human social cognition that tamer ancestors had shown.
Nevertheless, Bering is never boring and I strongly suggest everyone interested in a breezy look at contemporary evolutionary science to subscribe to his RSS feed.
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