FEATURE
wouldn ’ t know someone else had already run that study but not gotten significant results .
So , what happens when you get negative results ? You try to figure out why . In this case the researchers were looking at reciprocity . Do these results mean that dogs don ’ t — or can ’ t — reciprocate ? Or is it that dogs do reciprocate , but something about the study design failed to capture reciprocation ? To answer these questions , researchers need to conduct additional studies . And that ’ s exactly what these researchers did . They made adjustments to the study design and ran a second study . The results of the second study were reported in the same article as the first study , and we ’ d like to tell you about those results as well .
Are dogs hopelessly selfish when it comes to humans ? Do they view belly rubs and free meals as a oneway street ? Do we humans just give , give , give , and get nothing in return ? When it comes to food , the answer may very well be yes ! One possible reason the researchers suggest for the negative result is that “ the provision of food in the dog-human relationship is typically asymmetrical ”— in other words , we humans pretty much always provide the food in modern dog-human relationships .
In the second study , the researchers made two major changes . First , they shortened the lag time between the experience with the helpful and unhelpful humans and the testing phase . In the first study , there was a gap of up to 22 days between the two phases . That kind of delay certainly seems to us like it could affect the results ! To account for that possibility , in the second study , the researchers made sure both phases happened on the same day . Also , they simplified the task by giving the human only one button to push . The button either worked or it didn ’ t . This is in contrast to the first study that had a functional as well as a non-functional button and seemed to call on dogs to figure out the human ’ s intent based on which button they pressed . With these changes in place , the researchers ran the study again . Some of the dogs in the second study had participated in the first study as well , but several were new . I bet you ’ re thinking things went differently this time around .
We certainly were . But it turns out they got the same results — there was no effect of condition or human type .
So , what does this all mean ? Are dogs hopelessly selfish when it comes to humans ? Do they view belly rubs and free meals as a one-way street ? Do we humans just give , give , give , and get nothing in return ? When it comes to food , the answer may very well be yes ! One possible reason the researchers suggest for the negative result is that “ the provision of food in the dog-human relationship is typically asymmetrical ”— in other words , we humans pretty much always provide the food in modern doghuman relationships . So , is it even reasonable to expect dogs to think in terms of providing food to us ? On the other hand , adult dogs don ’ t usually give each other food either ( though adult dogs might feed young puppies ), but there have been studies like the one we discussed at the beginning where adult dogs have shown reciprocity with other adult dogs using food . And of course , all of this doesn ’ t mean that dogs couldn ’ t learn to give us food , but their learning history may prevent that behavior from occurring to them spontaneously . After all , they have a long history of receiving food without reciprocating ( or even having the option to reciprocate ).
Fig 11 : Proportion of time spent in proximity to the two different human types . Boxes display the interquartile range , black horizontal bars represent the median , whiskers represent the range of data points within 1.5 times the interquartile range from the upper and lower hinge , and circles represent individual data points .
Another point the researchers raise is that in the “ free roaming ” part of the experiment , the dogs did not show a preference for either human . ( Fig 11 ) This might suggest that the dogs didn ’ t recognize the human ’ s act of pressing the button as helpful . It can definitely be viewed as a bit of a cognitive leap to go from “ human pressed button over in another enclosure ” to “ I got food because the human pressed a button over in the other enclosure .” That ’ s a fairly abstract concept . Other research has involved more obvious methods of providing food , such as opening a box or pulling a rope to reveal a tray . The researchers suggest the results might have been different if they had used a less abstract food provision method . And while there has been research where dogs pushed a button to open a door for their humans , in those studies , the humans pointed at the button and gave other signals . This is significant because other research has shown that dogs are very sensitive and responsive to human social cues , and also that dogs often will not try that hard to solve a problem without encouragement from people .
The most telling point that the researchers bring up in discussing their negative result , though , is that cooperative interactions that occur in nature usually involve clear physical interaction ( as when animals groom each other ). In this research , the human was separated from the dog by a barrier , and never touched the dog or
42 Building Better Trainers Through Education