SEX DIFFERENCES IN THE ACQUISITION OF SPATIAL INFORMATION FROM HUMAN DEMONSTRATORS BY DOGS

In deferred imitation tasks, dogs typically act in the location, rather than on the object, where the demonstrator acted. However it is not known what kind of spatial information (allocentric or egocentric) dogs use to encode and recall the location of the demonstration and whether this differs between sexes. We tested 15 dogs (8 females, 7 males), previously trained with the Do as I Do method (Fugazza and Miklósi 2014), in a deferred imitation task. A human demonstrator approached one of two identical targets, at two different locations; after a short interval, the dog was required to imitate the action, facing a direction opposite to that faced during the demonstration, thereby with conflicting allocentric and egocentric information. We used the number of allocentric or egocentric choices in 6 trials to classify dogs as egocentric or allocentric. Subsequently dogs were tested on their ability to resort to the non-preferred strategy. Dogs preferentially used an allocentric strategy in the first phase (median allocentric choices = 5, min = 5, max = 6); when such strategy became unsuitable to solve the task, males outperformed females, reaching the set criterion of 3 egocentric choices in a row in fewer trials (median trials to criterion: males = 3, females = 9, Mann-Whitney U Test P = 0.04). Results demonstrate a general preference by dogs for acquiring allocentric information from humans. The higher flexibility shown by males supports the existence of sex-related differences in spatial cognition in dogs, as observed in other species (Rodriguez at al. 2010).