The implicit reward value of the owner's face for dogs

Henrietta Bolló; Orsolya Kiss; Anna Kis; József Topál

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2021.102763

The implicit reward value of the owner's face for dogs

iScience. 2021 Jun 24;24(8):102763. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102763. eCollection 2021 Aug 20.

Authors

Henrietta Bolló¹, Orsolya Kiss^{1

2}, Anna Kis¹, József Topál¹

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Magyar tudósok krt 2., 1117 Budapest, Hungary.
² Center for Health Sciences, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, USA.

Abstract

It is increasingly assumed that domestication has equipped dogs with unique socio-cognitive skills, which raises the possibility of intriguing parallels between the social motivational systems of the two species. However, the positive incentive value of human facial stimuli is a largely unexplored area. Here, we investigated whether the owner's face serves as a social reinforcer. In a two-way choice task N = 39 dogs were presented with a short video about their owners' head showing the face (facing owner [FO]) vs. the back of the head (non-facing owner). Despite both locations containing equal food reward, dogs approached the container associated with FO more frequently (p < .001), and this was not affected by side, trial order, and choice latency. However, the considerable inter-individual differences in dogs' task performance suggest that the added social component required special social skills which need to be further explored.

Keywords: Behavioral neuroscience; Biological sciences; Neuroscience.