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.

家犬在利用人类视觉信号定位隐藏食物方面展现出尤为出众的能力。据我们所知，本系列研究是首个仅考察家犬借助听觉交际行为定位隐藏食物能力的研究。在第一项实验中，一名实验者立于障碍物后方，对位于左侧或右侧的置食箱表现出兴奋情绪，同时其所处位置更靠近未置食箱。家犬成功追随实验者的声音方向定位到了食物。在后续两项对照实验中，我们排除了家犬仅依靠嗅觉定位食物箱的可能性，并证实家犬仅在能够识别环境中潜在指涉对象（即其中一个箱子）的前提下，才会以指涉性方式解读人类的声音指向。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，结果显示拥有适量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，幼犬与成年家犬表现出的相似性，对驯化假说具有重要的理论启示意义。