The study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, found that chimpanzees could care less when people pointed to objects, but dogs paid attention and knew precisely what the person wanted.
"We think that we are looking at a special adaptation in dogs to be sensitive to human forms of communication," study co-author Juliane Kaminski, a cognitive psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said.
"There is multiple evidence suggesting that selection pressures during domestication have changed dogs such that they are perfectly adapted to their new niche, the human environment," Kaminski told Discovery News.
Dogs may even be born with this inherent gift, since six-week-old puppies with no major training possess it.
For the study, Kaminski and her team compared how well chimps and dogs understood human pointing. If the chimp or dog retrieved the object -- which is out of reach of the human but within reach of the animals -- they would be rewarded with a tasty food treat.
The chimps bombed, ignoring the human gestures, even though they were interested and motivated to get the food rewards. But the dogs aced the test, the researchers said.
The chimpanzees did not see the pointing as important to their goal of getting the food, so they simply ignored the people during the study, they said.
Kaminski said: "We know that chimpanzees have a very flexible understanding of others. They know what others can or cannot see, when others can or cannot see them, etc."
Chimps are therefore not clueless, but they have likely not evolved the tendency to pay attention to humans when trying to achieve goals. Kaminski explained that even wolves do not have this skill. "Wolves, even when raised in a human environment, are not as flexible with human communication as dogs. Dogs can read human gestures from very early ages on," she said.
As for cats, prior research found that domesticated felines also pay attention to us and can understand human pointing gestures.
Kaminski, however, mentioned that the researchers had to select them out of many hundreds of cats, suggesting that only certain house kitties are on par with dogs when it comes to understanding people.
Researchers are now puzzled as popular theories about communication hold that certain core abilities can be inherited, Kaminski said.
Chimpanzees are so close to us on the primate family tree, and yet they cannot seem to understand our pointing gestures. This suggests that pointing may be a unique form of human communication, but dogs challenge the hypothesis.
"We therefore need to study in more detail the mechanisms behind dogs' understanding of human forms of communication," Kaminski added.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
