Dogs do not use their own experience with novel barriers to infer others’ visual access

Despite extensive research into the Theory of Mind abilities in nonhuman
animals, it remains controversial whether they can attribute mental states
to other individuals or whether they merely predict future behaviour based
on previous behavioural cues. In the present study, we tested pet dogs (in
total, N=92) on adaptations of the “goggles test” previously used with
human infants and great apes. In both a cooperative and a competitive
task, dogs were given direct experience with the properties of novel
screens (one opaque, the other transparent) inserted into identical, but
differently coloured, tunnels. Dogs learned and remembered the properties
of the screens even when, later on, these were no longer directly visible
to them. Nevertheless, they were not more likely to follow the
experimenter’s gaze to a target object when the experimenter could see it
through the transparent screen. Further, they did not prefer to steal a
forbidden treat first in a location obstructed from the experimenter’s
view by the opaque screen. Therefore, dogs did not show perspective-taking
abilities in this study in which the only available cue to infer others’
visual access consisted of the subjects’ own previous experience with
novel visual barriers. We conclude that the behaviour of our dogs, unlike
that of infants and apes in previous studies, does not show evidence of
experience projection abilities.