Publications

Over the past few years, the copying of irrelevant actions (overimitation) has been studied in domestic dogs, with evidence supporting the hypothesis that the dog-human relationship drives this behaviour. To further explore this influence, we compared two distinct groups of dogs with potentially differing relationship qualities to their caregivers in an overimitation (OI) task: assistance dogs and family dogs. Using the Monash Dog Owner Relationship Scale (MDORS), we assessed caregiver perceptions of the dog-human bond and found significant differences between these two groups. Unlike previous studies conducted in laboratory settings, we studied overimitation in a naturalistic home environment to better understand its occurrence in everyday life. Surprisingly, our findings revealed that assistance dogs did not copy their caregiver’s irrelevant actions significantly more than family dogs, but family dogs performed the irrelevant actions significantly more than a group without any action-demonstrator. Interestingly, only 34.7 % of all dogs in our sample overimitated, highlighting variability in this behaviour across individuals. However, our results suggest that overimitation also occurs within family dogs’ day-to-day environment, but assistance dogs with special training do not show higher OI rates in comparison. 

Among the many mechanisms of social learning, imitation is the learning of new behaviors or skills by directly transforming a visual representation of a demonstrator's actions into one's own motor output. The emphasis here is on the precise copying of a sequence of movements or the model's response topography. The necessity of finding empirical evidence for this distinct social learning process forced researchers to clarify imitation's definition and find appropriate test procedures. The result of this development is a comparatively low number of cases with conclusive evidence for imitation in non-human animals, especially in the wild, in contrast to humans.

Individuals often copy another’s causally irrelevant actions despite their inefficiency toward goals. The present study investigated the influence of model familiarity on this behavior—known as “overimitation”—with a two-phase overimitation task. We tested whether 5-year-old Austrian children (N = 52, 28 males) would overimitate their parents more than a stranger when operating a novel puzzle box. First, an inefficient strategy was demonstrated by a parent (or stranger) before the child’s first turn on the box; then, an efficient strategy was demonstrated by a stranger (or parent) before the child’s second turn. Results showed that children who first saw their parent’s inefficient strategy overimitated it slightly more than those who saw the stranger’s. After the efficient demonstration, we observed a reduction in children’s overimitation of their parent’s (but not the stranger’s) inefficient strategy. Comparisons to a no-model (baseline) condition revealed significantly higher overimitation scores for our parent-then-stranger and stranger-then-parent conditions in the first phase, but only for the stranger-then-parent condition in the second phase. We also observed children protesting against their parents’ efficient demonstration (in favor of the stranger’s inefficient demonstration). These results suggest (a) that overimitation can occur in two ways (supporting a dual-process theory) and (b) that children selectively overimitate depending on model familiarity.

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) have been documented to ‘overimitate’ humans – a form of social learning – by copying their causally-irrelevant actions. It is suggested that this behaviour results from social, affiliative motivations. Dogs have also been known to behave differently when they are being watched (or not) by humans, such as by following commands better (or worse). In this study, we tested whether dogs’ copying behaviour would also be sensitive to their caregiver’s attentional states. The subject’s caregiver demonstrated irrelevant and relevant actions in the dot-touching overimitation task, then during trials the caregiver was either watching their dog or turned away. Our results revealed no difference in dogs’ irrelevant-action copying; however, we found that dogs approached the dots less per trial when their caregiver was watching them. Dogs also copied their caregiver’s leftward sliding of a door (to obtain a food reward) more accurately when they were being watched by their caregiver. Finally, dogs who copied the irrelevant action did so more often after obtaining their food reward, which supports that these dogs may have had two separate goals: a primary instrumental goal and a secondary social goal.

Domestic dogs have been shown to copy their caregiver’s actions, including ones which are causally-irrelevant to a physical goal—a behaviour called “overimitation”. In a new overimitation task with a non-food reward, this study investigated “causal misunderstanding”—falsely assuming causally-irrelevant actions to have functional relevancy—as an explanation for dog overimitation (N = 81). By providing dogs with prior experience of the task to learn about the consequences of its irrelevant box-stepping and relevant bucket-opening action to obtain a toy-ball, we tested whether and when dogs would copy their caregiver’s irrelevant-action demonstrations. Dogs with and without prior experience were compared to a third (control) group of dogs, who had neither prior experience nor caregiver demonstrations of the task. Results revealed that the timing of overimitation, rather than its frequency, was closely related to dogs' prior experience: dogs with prior experience attended to their reward first, then interacted with the irrelevant box later (“post-goal overimitation”), while dogs without prior experience first interacted with the irrelevant box (“pre-goal overimitation”). Our results suggest that, when action consequences are understood, dogs are overimitating for a secondary social goal that is clearly distinct from the task goal of obtaining a physical reward.

Overimitation — the copying of another’s unnecessary or irrelevant actions toward a goal — is largely considered to be uniquely human. Recent studies, however, have found evidence of this behavior in dogs. Humans seem to overimitate more or less depending on social factors, such as the cultural origin of the demonstrator. Like humans, dogs may have social motivations behind their overimitation, since they have been shown to copy irrelevant actions more from their caregivers than from strangers. By using priming methodology, this study aimed to investigate whether dogs’ overimitation can be facilitated via the experimental manipulation of their attachment-based motivations. To test this, we invited caregivers to demonstrate goal-irrelevant and relevant actions to their dog, following either a dog-caregiver relationship prime, a dog-caregiver attention prime, or no prime. Our results showed no significant main effect of priming on copying behavior for either relevant or irrelevant actions, but we found a trend that unprimed dogs copied the least actions overall. Additionally, dogs copied their caregiver’s relevant actions more often and more faithfully as the number of trials increased. Our final finding was that dogs were much more likely to copy irrelevant actions after (rather than before) already achieving the goal. This study discusses the social motivations behind dog imitative behavior, and has potential methodological implications regarding the influence of priming on dog behavioral studies.