About this Psychology article

The Effect of Domestication and Experience on the Social Interaction of Dogs and Wolves With a Human Companion by Lazzaroni, Martina; Range, Friederike; Backes, Jessica; Portele, Katrin; Scheck, Katharina; Marshall-Pescini, Sarah is a Psychology article available to read on EtoBox.

The results of current wolf-dog studies on human-directed behaviors seem to suggest that domestication has acted on dogs’ general attitudes and not on specific socio-cognitive skills. A recent hypothesis suggests that domestication may have increased dogs’ overall sociability (hypersociability hypothesis). The aim of the present study was to test one aspect of the hypersociability hypothesis, whereby dogs should be more interested in social human contact compared to wolves, and to investigate the relative roles of both domestication and experience on the value that dogs attribute to human social contact. We compared equally raised wolves and dogs kept at the Wolf Science Center (WSCw, WSCd) but also dogs with different human socialization experiences i.e., pet dogs and free-ranging dogs. We presented subjects with a simple test, divided in two phases: in the Pre-test phase animals were exposed to two people in succession. One person invited the animal for a social/cuddle session (contact provider) and the other fed the animal (food provider). In the Test phase, animals could choose which of the two persons to approach, when both stood in a neutral posture. We directly compared WSCd

Author

Lazzaroni, Martina; Range, Friederike; Backes, Jessica; Portele, Katrin; Scheck, Katharina; Marshall-Pescini, Sarah

Publisher

Frontiers; Frontiers Media SA; Frontiers Media S.A.; Lausanne: Frontiers Media S.A., 2010- (ISSN 1664-1078)

Published

2020

Language

EN

Field

Psychology (Social Sciences)