Is dogs' tendency to follow human misleading communicative cues influenced by humans' auditory perspective?

ABSTRACT: Studying Theory of Mind in non-verbal populations requires designing tasks that address the distinction between responding based on directly perceivable cues and additionally inferring others' mental states. We designed and pre-registered an auditory version of a non-verbal change-of-location task, to investigate whether dogs are sensitive to a human communicator's mental states about the location of food. With control conditions we ruled out alternative cognitive processes such as associative learning. Dogs (N = 240) could witness that food was hidden first in one opaque bucket (A) and then relocated to a second opaque bucket (B) by an experimenter. Before being allowed to retrieve the food from one of the buckets, dogs received a misleading suggestion (A) from the communicator, who could

SUBMITTER: Lonardo L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12748098 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature