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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.
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