Effectiveness of verbal and gestural signals and familiarity with signal-senders on the performance of working dogs

Scandurra, Anna; Alterisio, Alessandra; Marinelli, Lieta; Mongillo, Paolo; Semin, Gün R.; D’Aniello, Biagio

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.12/5585

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Authors

Scandurra, Anna

Alterisio, Alessandra

Abstract(s)

We assessed how highly trained dogs respond to gestural versus verbal signals when their handlers oran unfamiliar person asked them to perform an obedience task. Dogs were requested to perform fourdifferent actions (“Sit”, “Down”, “Stay” and “Come”) upon receiving congruent (only gestural or onlyverbal) or incongruent signals (gestural and verbal signals contradict each other).The dogs’ performance measures were the frequency of correct responses and their response latency.Generalized Estimation Equation models were used to determine whether the type of signal, the coher-ence of the signals and familiarity with the signaler influenced dogs’ responses.Our results show that the probability of dogs expressing the requested behaviour was lower when thestranger gave verbal signals, than in any of the other conditions. In the incongruent condition, the prob-ability that dogs expressed the behaviour indicated by the verbal signal was lower for signals providedby the stranger than for signals provided by the owner. The reverse was observed for gestural signals. Ingeneral, longer latencies to perform the “Come”, “Down” and “Sit” behaviours were observed in responseto the stranger’s verbal signals than when the stranger gave gestural or incongruent signals. Additionally,the response latency to the stranger’s verbal stimuli took longer than verbal stimuli were provided bythe owner in the case of “Come” (P = 0.002) and “Sit” (P < 0.001) actions.Our data support the argument that for highly trained dogs, gestural signals are less dependent uponsignal-giver familiarity, whereas verbal signals are less effective when they are given by an unfamiliarperson.