Data from: Domestic dogs and puppies can use human voice direction referentially

Domestic dogs are particularly skilled at using human visual signals to locate hidden food. This is, to our knowledge, the first series of studies that investigates the ability of dogs to use only auditory communicative acts to locate hidden food. In a first study, from behind a barrier, a human expressed excitement towards a baited box on either the right or left side, while sitting closer to the unbaited box. Dogs were successful in following the human's voice direction and locating the food. In the two following control studies, we excluded the possibility that dogs could locate the box containing food just by relying on smell, and we showed that they would interpret a human's voice direction in a referential manner only when they could locate a possible referent (i.e. one of the boxes) in the environment. Finally, in a fourth study, we tested 8–14-week-old puppies in the main experimental test and found that those with a reasonable amount of human experience performed overall even better than the adult dogs. These results suggest that domestic dogs’ skills in comprehending human communication are not based on visual cues alone, but are instead multi-modal and highly flexible. Moreover, the similarity between young and adult dogs’ performances has important implications for the domestication hypothesis.家犬尤其擅长利用人类的视觉信号定位隐藏的食物。据我们所知，本系列研究首次探究了家犬仅依靠听觉交际行为定位隐藏食物的能力。在第一项实验中，实验者站在障碍物后方，对左侧或右侧的藏食箱表现出兴奋情绪，同时自身距离未藏食的箱子更近。家犬均能成功跟随实验者的声音方向定位到藏有食物的箱子。在后续两项对照实验中，我们排除了家犬仅依靠嗅觉定位藏食箱的可能性，并证实家犬仅在能识别环境中潜在指代物（即其中一个箱子）的情况下，才会以指代性方式解读人类的声音方向。最后，在第四项实验中，我们对8至14周龄的幼犬开展了核心实验测试，结果发现拥有充足人类互动经验的幼犬整体表现甚至优于成年家犬。上述结果表明，家犬理解人类交际行为的能力并非仅依赖视觉线索，而是具备多模态且高度灵活的特性。此外，幼犬与成年家犬的表现相似性，对驯化假说具有重要的理论启示。