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1 Dogs are known for their ability to cooperate with humans and read our social cues. But are these skills biologically prepared? To find out, we tested 375 puppies at 8.5 weeks on 4 social cognition tasks (task descriptions: http://bit.ly/3bPL7wO ) #AnimBehav2021 #Cognition
2 We found that social skills are present from an early age. Puppies followed communicative cues at levels far exceeding chance expectation, and readily gazed to a person’s face during our human interest and unsolvable tasks #AnimBehav2021 #Cognition
3 These skills didn’t require extensive socialization—pups were tested when still living with littermates, prior to living with their individual raisers. Pups also showed no evidence of learning across trials and were above chance from the very 1st trial #AnimBehav2021 #Cognition
4 Our most novel finding was that social cognitive skills exhibited high heritability, estimated using models incorporating a relatedness matrix for our population. Sensitivity to pointing was most heritable (44% of variation attributable to genetics) #AnimBehav2021 #Cognition
5 While often assumed to be the case, our study provides the first direct evidence that a large proportion of variability in dog social cognition is heritable. Thus, these skills would have had strong potential to undergo selection #AnimBehav2021 #Cognition
6 Thanks to coauthors @g_gnanadesikan @DanielHorschler @EvanMacLean @CCIpuppydoc Kerinne Levy Tom Famula, amazing collaborator @ccicanine, our funders, & Twitter Conference hosts @AnimBehavSociety + @asab_tweets! Acknowledgments and puppy antics below 
#AnimBehav2021 #Cognition
#AnimBehav2021 #Cognition
