Role of social relevance in heretospecific social cognition of dogs.

Social cognition in animals refers to complex abilities that range from inter-individual communication and learning to the ability of “inferring the presence of mental states in others by observing their appearance and behaviour under various circumstances”. Over the last decade, a number of studies in this field explored the presence and the characteristics of social abilities of dogs in their interactions with humans. These researches gave evidences that dogs are capable of very sophisticated heterospecific skills such as modifying their behaviour with regard to the attentional state of humans, using human-given postural cues to identify a target, learning and responding to human words and learning by observing humans. Even imitation of human demonstrators is hypothesised in this species. While it seems very likely that domestication has played an important role in canine heterospecific social cognition, less known is the contribution to the development of these skills given by other crucial determinants, like ontogenesis, learning, lifelong experience and emotional component underlying this complex heterospecific relationship. The aim of this paper is to focus attention just about the last aspect.