Dogs with prior experience of a task still overimitate their caregiver

Abstract

AbstractDomestic dogs have been shown to copy their caregiver’s actions, including ones which are causally-irrelevant to a physical goal—a behaviour called “overimitation”. In a new overimitation task with a non-food reward, this study investigated “causal misunderstanding”—falsely assuming causally-irrelevant actions to have functional relevancy—as an explanation for dog overimitation (N = 81). By providing dogs with prior experience of the task to learn about the consequences of its irrelevant box-stepping and relevant bucket-opening action to obtain a toy-ball, we tested whether and when dogs would copy their caregiver’s irrelevant-action demonstrations. Dogs with and without prior experience were compared to a third (control) group of dogs, who had neither prior experience nor caregiver demonstrations of the task. Results revealed that the timing of overimitation, rather than its frequency, was closely related to dogs' prior experience: dogs with prior experience attended to their reward first, then interacted with the irrelevant box later (“post-goal overimitation”), while dogs without prior experience first interacted with the irrelevant box (“pre-goal overimitation”). Our results suggest that, when action consequences are understood, dogs are overimitating for a secondary social goal that is clearly distinct from the task goal of obtaining a physical reward.