Social cognition in the domestic dog: behaviour of spectators towards participants in interspecific games

Social cognition, in particular the derivation of social information from observation of interactions between members of a social group, has been widely investigated in primates, but it has received little attention in other social mammals, although it has been anecdotally reported in the domestic dog, Canis familiaris. We recorded the behaviour of dogs ('spectators') that had observed controlled interactions between a human and a dog (the 'demonstrator') competing for an object, and that were subsequently allowed to interact freely with both participants. When the competitions were playful, as indicated by signals performed by the human, the spectator was more likely to approach the winner first and/or more rapidly, suggesting that winners of games are perceived as desirable social partners. When the human did not perform play signals, changing the social context from play to contest over a resource, spectators were slower to approach either of the participants, suggesting that participants in contests were less desirable as social partners than participants in games. If the dog was prevented from seeing the game, it still reacted differently to the winner and the loser, but its behaviour was not the same as after games that it had seen. We conclude that spectator dogs gain information from the players' subsequent behaviour as well as from direct observation of the game. (c) 2006 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.