Clever Dog Lab

(Comparative Cognition / Messerli Research Institute)

Human’s best friend in the focus: We study dogs’ social and physical cognition and the diversity of dog-human interactions to better understand dogs and how they see the world we share.

Heads: Zsófia Virányi & Christoph Völter

All team members stand on the area in front of the Clever Dog Lab on the campus of the Vetmeduni

Highlights

Unwilling or unable? Dogs see the difference.

A dog stands in front of a plexiglass screen, on the other side of the screen a hand holds a piece of food towards the dog.

The dog Mia stands in front of a plexiglass screen, on the other side of the screen a hand holds a piece of food towards the dog. This experiment, in which treats are fed through holes in a plexiglass wall, investigates whether dogs understand people's intentions.

For a long time, behavioural researchers have been asking whether dogs can read human thoughts. Previous research has not yielded any clear results. The Clever Dog Lab of the Messerli Research Institute of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna has now taken a new approach. The researchers chose an experiment that is normally used for human babies, examined the dogs' behaviour with 3D tracking - and found out that the four-legged friends can distinguish human intentions.

Original publication

Are dogs sensitive to human mental states?

A dog sits in front of the dog owner and sees a person giving a treat into a container, a second person watches.

Research about "theory of mind": the dog observes the hiding of a treat and chooses later one of these containers. Photo: Lucrezia Lonardo

A new CDL study provides new insights on dogs’ perspective-taking abilities. In the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Lonardo et al. 2021) dogs reacted differently in response to human informants holding true and false beliefs about the location of a treat. This finding, along with our previous research, raises the intriguing possibility that dogs share our ability to represent others’ minds (perspective taking, Theory of Mind).

What do dogs feel when their caregiver shows affection to other dogs?

A dog lies on the table of an MRI scanner, the dog trainer stands next to it.

MRI with awake dogs requires professional training, the dog is prepared for testing in small steps. In the picture: Sabrina Karl. Photo: Yuliya Garbozanova

Dogs excel at reading the body language, behaviour and communicative signals of humans. But how do they interpret their caregivers’ behaviour towards others, particularly towards other dogs? A recent CDL study in collaboration with the SCAN Unit of the University of Vienna used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show for the first time what goes on in the dogs’ brain when they watched their caregiver greeting another dog (Karl et al. 2021 Cerebral Cortex Communications). The study was conducted at the co-founded Comparative Canine Neuroimaging Unit.

ManyDogs, a new international research collaboration, officially launched

In the foreground of the picture there is a dog watching a person in the background pointing at one of two cups standing on the ground

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A dog observes a pointing gesture by the experimenter before being allowed to choose one of the two cups. In the picture: Lena Zipperling. Photo: Anna Engelmann/Vetmeduni

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Banner Many Dogs

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Many Dogs advertises participation for research groups

In the ManyDogs initiative, we work together with canine cognition researchers from all around the world with the aim to foster collaboration and open science practices and to draw more robust conclusions about dogs’ cognitive abilities, including their variability across individuals and breeds. We are currently running our first study, ManyDogs 1 (Espinosa et al. 2021 PsyArXiv), on dog-human social communication. The aim is to take a closer look at the long-debated question of whether dogs understand pointing as an informative gesture, as an imperative command, or as a simple associative cue?

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