Out-of-reach rewards elicit human-oriented referential communicative behaviours in family dogs but not in family pigs.

ABSTRACT: Human-oriented referential communication has been evidenced not only in domestic but also in some wild species, however, the importance of domestication-unrelated species' characteristics in the emergence of this capacity remains largely unexplored. One shared property of all species reported to exhibit referential communication is the efficient use of visual social signals. To assess the potential role of species-specific characteristics in the emergence of human-oriented referential communication, we compared similarly socialised companion animals from two domestic species: dogs, which rely heavily on conspecific visual social signals; and pigs, which do not. We used an out-of-reach reward paradigm with three conditions: both human and reward present, only human present, only reward pres

SUBMITTER: Perez Fraga P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9871027 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature