Oral Presentation (1) February 19

Social cognition can be defined as the ability to solve social problems. Social interaction involves cooperation and competition. One skill is to know what visual information others have access to. This may determine the best strategy to follow and the best way to solve the problem. Numerous species live in groups and therefor there is potential for the evolution of attention reading. How this skill is distributed across species is an important question.
We therefor report a series of different studies about visual perception in goats (Capra hircus), dogs (Canis familiaris) and apes (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes and Pongo pygmaeus).
The subjects were brought either in a competitive situation (subordinate goat and dominant goat, dog and human) or communicative situation (ape and human) over food. In all these studies the subjects could benefit from knowing what the other individual can and cannot see either by visiting a food location that could not be seen by the dominant (goat and dogs) or by begging for food in an appropriate way (apes). In all three species we found behavioral differences according to the different status of the others visual perception. Subordinate goats for example did approach a food place which is not visible for the dominant goat more often compared to a food place which is visible for both individuals. In the study with dogs it was found that the dogs behaved in clearly different ways in most of the conditions in which the human did not watch them, as opposed to the control condition in which she did.

KAMINSKI, Juliane
Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology,
Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Inselstr. 22, D-04103, Leipzig, Germany
kaminski@eva.mpg.de