Man’s best influential friend - first evidence for human observational learning from a dog demonstrator in a spatial task

Abstract Social learning has paramount importance in the collection of knowledge and behavioral patterns in humans. Task-difficulty, demonstrator credibility, and emotional closeness between the participants can enhance the likelihood of social information transfer. Humans form close emotional bonds with companion animals, but it is unknown whether they learn behavioral patterns via observation from an animal. We studied whether humans would spontaneously learn from a dog ‘demonstrator’ in a spatial (detour) task. We tested 117 adult Hungarian dog owners (33 men and 84 women) in three groups. In two groups, an unfamiliar human, or a dog, demonstrated the detour around a V-shaped fence. In the control group, the task was not demonstrated at all. To keep the task spontaneous, we asked the owners to perform the detour with the goal: „to provide additional information”, to their own dog about the task. In the control group participants chose randomly between the right and left side of the obstacle when making a detour, however, they followed the demonstrated side significantly above chance in both the dog and human demonstrations. Handedness, or gender of the participants, did not have an effect, with the exception that men performed the task slower. These are the first results that detected a strong willingness in adult humans to spontaneously follow an unknown dog’s behavioral pattern in an otherwise easy task, most likely via local enhancement. We assume that the strong emotional bond between (dog-owning) humans and dogs can induce synchronization between humans and dogs in locomotory tasks.