Following others' gaze direction is an important source of information that helps to detect prey or predators, to notice important social events within one's social group and to predict the next actions of others. As such, it is considered a key step towards an understanding of mental states, such as attention and intention.
Many animals will follow the gaze of others into distant space. Following a gaze around a barrier, which is considered to be a more cognitively advanced task, is much less common.
Friederike Range and Zsofi Viranyi at the University of Vienna have now observed this behavior in wolves, a behavior previously only observed in birds and primates.
Their findings are published on Feb. 23 in the online journal PLoS ONE.
The researchers found that hand-raised wolves readily detoured an obstacle in order to check where a conspecific or human demonstrator was looking, indicating that gaze following around a barrier is not restricted to primates and corvids. The wolves, however, quickly stopped responding to repeated looks if they found nothing interesting on the other side of the barrier.
On the contrary, they did not habituate to repeated looks of a human demonstrator into distant space, supporting the idea that the two gaze following modalities have different underlying cognitive mechanisms. These new data shed light on the evolutionary origins of gaze following abilities and allow scientists to hypothesize about the selective pressures shaping such fine-tuned attentional coordination in social animals.
Citation: Range F, Vira´nyi Z (2011) Development of Gaze Following Abilities in Wolves (Canis Lupus). PLoS ONE 6(2): e16888. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016888
Funding: This research has been supported by the FWF (P21244), Royal Canin and the Game Park Ernstbrunn. FWF (http://www.fwf.ac.at/index.asp), Royal Canin (http://www.royal-canin.at/). Moreover, as a scientific society the Wolf Science Center is largely funded through private, anonymous donors. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Altough Royal Canin is supporting the Wolf Science Center with donations, the authors confirm that this does not alter their adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, as detailed online in the guide for authors.
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PLoS ONE