Some puppies seem to know how to ask for a person鈥檚 help at just 6 weeks old, by repeatedly alternating their gaze between a human and the situation they are struggling with.
That is even younger than when babies start communicating that way, , says at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna in Austria. meaningfully alternating their gazes at between 8 and 10 months old.
In 2021, scientists found that puppies can make eye contact with people and respond to their communication efforts, but it was unclear whether they could initiate such communication themselves.
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Dogs raised in kennels generally only start intentionally communicating with humans, via their gaze, as young adults. But puppies brought up in someone鈥檚 home interact much more with people, which might accelerate their communication, says Riemer.
To learn more, Riemer and her colleagues studied 83 puppies, aged 41 to 52 days, of eight different breeds that were raised by 11 small-scale breeders in their homes.
With the breeders present, Riemer 鈥� whom the puppies were familiar with 鈥� took each dog into an unknown room of its home. She then presented each puppy with an unsolvable task or a colourful, battery-operated toy resembling a paper bag, which she suspected the puppies would be wary of.
For the task, the puppies first learned that food was beneath an overturned plastic cup, but it was later stuck down and couldn鈥檛 be knocked over.
The researchers recorded if the puppies glanced between either the toy or the stuck cup and a person鈥檚 face within 2 seconds. They found that 69 per cent of them alternated their gazes with the toy and 46 per cent did so with the stuck cup.
The findings suggest that puppies often try to communicate with people when they have previously benefited from repeated and early positive interactions with humans, says at Luther College in Iowa.
鈥淭hey could be looking at the human for help, they could be looking at the human to gain information about why they can鈥檛 solve the task or whether the novel object is safe to interact with, or they could be looking at the human for permission to interact further with the object since the human may or may not encourage this behaviour,鈥� says Gould.
Whatever the puppies are trying to achieve, this suggests that socialisation plays a role in their development, says Gould.
Animal Cognition
