Ádám Miklósi: Eötvös University Department of Ethology

For longer than we can remember dogs and humans have been friends. While both humanity and dogs benefited from this relationship, science has not shown any interest in the “Whys” and “How-s” until recently. However, the last 15 years have pushed the dog into the middle ground
of comparative investigations that aim to understand the evolution and mechanisms of social behavior.

In this presentation I will present a simple descriptive model for convergent
behavioral evolution of dog social behavior in the anthropogenic environment. The central
example will describe how in a very simple way dogs may have adapted to the pedagogical
nature of humans. We have good experimental evidence that dogs can be attracted to human
communicative intent, to human referential signals, and may learn about the referent. Parallel
work has shown that this ability shows strong parallels to early pedagogical interaction
between human infants and caregivers but rests probably on different mechanisms. In any
case, the dogs’ receptiveness to human social signals enhances their survival in our social
niche.

Based on these findings we can put forward a more general model of social behavior in the
case of inter-specific relationships, introducing the concept of social competence. It turns out that
this may be particularly useful in recent research which is aimed to envisage a “new world” of
human-artificial agent social interaction.

http://bec.ucla.edu/papers/MiklosiPaper.pdf