Dogs rapidly develop socially competent behaviour while interacting with a contingently responding self-propelled object

The relative contribution of evolutionary and ontogenetic mechanisms to the emergence of communicative signals in social interactions is one of the central questions in social cognition. Most previously used methods utilized the presentation of a novel signal or a novel context to test effects of predisposition and/or experience. However, all share the common problem that the familiar social partners used in the test context as actors carry over a variety of contextual information from previous interactions with the subjects. In the present study we utilized a novel method for separating the familiar actor from the action. We tested whether dogs behave in a socially competent way towards an unidentified moving object (UMO) in a communicative situation after interacting with it in a different context. We found that dogs were able to find hidden food based on the approach behaviour of the UMO only if they obtained previous experience with it in a different context. In contrast no such prior experience was needed in the case of an unfamiliar human partner. These results suggest that dogs' social behaviour is flexible enough to generalize from previous communicative interactions with humans to a novel unfamiliar partner, and this inference may be based on the dogs' well-developed social competence. The rapid adjustment to the new context and continued high performance suggest that evolutionary ritualization also facilitates the recognition of potentially communicative actions.