Dog breeds selected to work in visual contact with humans, such as sheep dogs and gun dogs, are better able to comprehend a pointing gesture than those breeds that usually work without direct supervision.
A series of tests, described in BioMed Central’s open access journal Behavioral and Brain Functions, should caution researchers against making simple generalizations about the effects of domestication and on dog-wolf differences in the utilization of human visual signals.
Márta Gácsi, from Eötvös University, Hungary, worked with a team of researchers to examine the performance of different breeds of dogs in making sense of the human pointing gesture. Gácsi said, “It has been suggested that the study of the domestic dog might help to …
