Investigating the Influence of Personality on Performance by Family-owned Dogs in a Human- Cued Task

Over the past decade, the object choice task has been used extensively to test the hypothesis that the ability of dogs to understand human social cues has resulted from the coevolutionary process of domestication (Hare et al., 2002). However, numerous factors can influence performance on this task (Reid, 2009), including artificial selection for attention and cooperation in specific working breeds (Gacsi et al., 2009). In 2005, Svartberg et al. proposed that certain canine personality traits could have been favored during the evolution of domestication. Based on this hypothesis, we predicted that boldness, trainability, and sociability – traits that should enhance the ability to attend and respond appropriately to human gestures would be positively related to performance in a human-cuing situation. We first had owners complete a questionnaire, and a canine personality survey developed by Kubinyi et al. (2009). Twenty-three adult dogs of various breeds each completed 16 trials on the object-choice task either indoors or outdoors. An unfamiliar human indicated the correct container using a momentary, proximal cue (gaze plus three taps). Mean percent correct performance (78.5%) was significantly better than random (one-sample t-test , 0.001), but individual binomial tests showed that only 16/23 dogs performed above chance (c goodness of fit test P 5 0.061). We simultaneously regressed performance onto seven predictor variables; together, they accounted for 62.5% of the variance in performance (P 5 0.011). Treat motivation (P 5 0.001), calmness (P 5 0.02), and indoor testing location (P 5 0.05)were unique significant predictors, all positively related to performance. Surprisingly, boldness, sociability, and trainability each had no significant relationship to performance. In fact, once treat motivation, calmness, and test site were taken into account in the multiple regression analysis, higher trainability scores were a significant negative predictor of performance (P 5 0.05). Thus, contrary to our predictions, personality traits that one might expect to have been favored during the evolution of domestication were not related to performance on the objectchoice task.We conclude that some dogsmay be predisposed to pay attention to human cues simply due to their willingness to work for treats and their calmness in particular testing environments.