Do children help dogs spontaneously?
Abstract
Two capacities considered foundational in human cooperation are prosocial motivation and goal-reading abilities that enable helping. Children exhibit both proclivities by age 2 in interactions with other humans, but interactions with nonhuman species on whom we have been interdependent for millennia are unstudied. We tested the hypothesis that children’s goal-reading and prosocial propensities extend to other animals. We predicted children would help pet dogs access objects that dogs attempted to reach but could not reach themselves. We studied 97 children between 2 and 3 years of age living in a small mid-western US city, 44 of whom had dogs as household pets. In a quasi-naturalistic setting, we introduced children to 1 of 3 friendly pet dogs who remained within a small, porous enclosure while a treat or toy was placed outside it. Dogs reacted naturally, either showing interest in accessing the item (e.g., pawing, begging) or ignoring it. Measures of dog and child behavior during sessions were coded blindly with high reliability. Children provided dogs with out-of-reach items twice as often when dogs showed interest rather than ignored items, indicating sensitivity to the dog’s goals. Additionally, children were more generally likely to provide dogs with items if children lived with pet dogs, if dogs were more lively and engaged rather than subdued and if the item was a treat rather than a toy. These findings lend support to our hypothesis that children’s early-developing proclivities for goal-reading and prosociality extend beyond humans to other animals.
Introduction
For millennia, humans have formed interdependent caregiving relationships with domesticated animals (Clutton-Brock, 1981; Zeuner, 1963). These relationships are often essential for survival, but we understand little about how human capabilities for interspecies care evolved. Such caregiving is peculiar within the animal kingdom. Although between-species interactions and dependence are everyday experiences in the lives of many animals—impala respond to the predator alarm calls of baboons (Kitchen et al., 2010), songbirds share information about food locations across species lines (Farine et al., 2015), and grouper fish recruit eels as partners in coordinated hunting (Bshary et al., 2006)—humans are the only animals currently known to habitually care for and raise individuals of other species on a large scale. How did animal care practices arise in so many different cultures and locations and with so many different nonhuman animal species? One hypothesis is that as a species we are highly capable and motivated to behave in helpful and caregiving ways towards other species because the psychological foundations that enable human-to-human cooperation to extend to other animals.
Two key psychological capacities that facilitate cooperation and helping in human-to-human contexts are: (1) the ability to infer others’ mental states, including knowledge, emotions, beliefs, desires and goals of others or Theory-of-Mind (Wellman, 1992) and (2) a motivation to behave prosocially towards others, and especially to help them to reach their own or joint goals (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006; 2007; Warneken 2015). Helping is an action that necessitates both goal-reading and prosocial motivation.
Previous studies on both humans and nonhuman animals indicate that both cognitive capacities and prosocial motivations to help have deep evolutionary and developmental roots. First, instrumental helping is demonstrated in experimental contexts by our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, towards their conspecifics as well as their human caretakers (Melis et al., 2011; Nolte and Call, 2021; Warneken and Tomasello 2006; Yamamoto et al., 2012). Second, children’s helpful behavior towards other humans, both adults and other children, is early developing—occurring by 2 years of age and in many cultures (Aime et al., 2017; Hepach et al., 2017a; 2017b; 2012). Because helping is so early developing and culturally widespread in humans, it has been considered a foundational part of our species’ evolved cooperative psychology (Warneken, 2015).
Indirect evidence from past research also suggests that children may be capable and motivated to help nonhuman animals as well as humans. First, children appear primed to attribute their minds to the world around them. For example pre-school-aged children readily anthropomorphize (Lane et al., 2010) and infants ascribe intentionality to moving shapes on a screen (Gergely and Csibra, 2003; Hamlin, 2013). Additionally, some evidence suggests that prosocial motivations towards other animals are heightened in children compared to adults. In a recent questionnaire study, for example children compared to adults prioritized the lives of dogs more equally to the lives of humans (Wilks et al., 2021). Given these propensities, it seems possible that young children would (1) attribute goals and (2) be motivated to help another nonhuman animal in a real-life interaction.
In this study, we tested the hypothesis that humans’ early developing propensities for helping other humans extend to nonhuman animals. Specifically, we predicted that in a quasi-naturalistic encounter with friendly pet dogs, 2- to 3-year-old children would help dogs to access desired out-of-reach items. We predicted that children would demonstrate goal-reading capabilities as well as prosocial motivations in this encounter, indicated by providing out-of-reach objects to dogs when dogs attempted to access objects rather than ignore them. We expected that children’s prior exposure to dogs as social partners would enhance their proclivities for helping. Therefore we predicted children with compared to children without pet dogs at home would help dogs access objects more often.
We chose to work with dogs as an initial study species for this inter-species helping investigation for two main reasons. First, dogs have a unique coevolutionary history with humans as they are by far the earliest known domesticated species (appearing genetically distinct from wolves as early as 23,000 years ago; Nagasawa et al., 2015; Perri et al., 2021). Second, dogs have evolved to read human social cues (Hare and Tomasello, 1999) and naturally seek out human help when they encounter problems: Dogs’ help-seeking behaviors such as reaching and ‘begging’ for items they cannot access (Marshall-Pescini et al., 2017) resemble the actions of human experimenters in a classic experimental helping paradigm (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006).
Methods
All research presented here was approved by the Institutional Review Board and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the University of Michigan. All children participated with the consent of their parents and their own verbal assent. The three dog ‘experimenters’ participated with the consent of their owners and their own eagerness to return to the study room.
PARTICIPANTS
We recruited 97 children of 1.7 to 3.1-year-old (51 female, 46 male; age range: 20–47 months) to participate in three iterations of our study at a university child laboratory, 44 of whom had pet dogs at home and 53 who did not. We chose this sample size to reveal comparable effects if children helped dogs at similar levels to their helping other humans. It was unclear what to expect with children helping dogs, but research with children helping adults in previous studies (Warneken and Tomasello 2006; 2007) has consistently found significant helping with sample sizes ranging from 24 to 36 children. We chose our age group after initially piloting with 14-month-old to 3-year-old children (n = 35). Younger children seemed overstimulated in the presence of the dog and had difficulty attending to the situation as was necessary for the study design used here. We also excluded children in our age range who were indicated by their parents (in a recruitment phone call) to be allergic to or highly fearful of dogs.
Children came from Ann Arbor, Michigan, US and surrounding towns where most families were middle class. By parental report, the majority of children (71%) identified as White, and 29% identified as multiracial, Black or African-American, Latino or Asian. A total of 36% of these children had a parent occupied in caring for them at home full-time, and all spoke English as their only language or fluently as one of their multiple languages.
Three dogs, Fiona, Henry and Seymour (Figure 1), participated as ‘experimenters’ in our study between 2015 and 2020. We initially chose to work with Fiona, who belonged to a close friend of one of the authors, because we observed Fiona to eagerly and gently interact with young children (iteration 1). To expand beyond a single dog, Henry, who belongs to one of the authors (who was never in the room with him during testing), joined the study (iterations 1–2). After Fiona moved away, we recruited Seymour, who belongs to a friend of one of the authors, as an “experimenter” (iteration 3). Fiona, Henry and Seymour spontaneously behaved differently in similar situations because of differences in personality, baseline activity and other factors. We did not attempt to control this variability but used it to assess children’s dog-directed behaviors in a generalizable way.
PROCEDURES
Children and their parents were taken to a testing room where one of three small dogs, either Fiona, Henry, or Seymour, sat in an enclosure created by a commercial baby-gate fence (Figures 1 and 2, Supplemental Video).
The enclosure had numerous holes and spaces to easily see the dog and to allow small objects (i.e., edible dog treats or toys) to be offered to the dog through the fence. We implemented this enclosure set up as a safety measure. Although all three dogs had no history of aggression and were gentle with children, the children were quite young and we were concerned that they or their parents might become startled or distressed if a dog initiated physical contact with them such as excited licking. Importantly, our initial IRB approval (iteration 1, n = 37 children) did not permit children to pet dogs. We were able to obtain IRB permission for petting for later participants (iterations 1 and 2, n = 60).
We used treats and toys as out-of-reach objects because both were of interest to dogs but might present different scenarios to children (e.g., feed the dog vs. play with the dog). Using both permitted us to distinguish whether children wanted to help the dog across different contexts rather than solely feeding or playing with the dog. There was also a ‘staging platform’ adjacent to the fence where we placed out-of-reach objects (the white box-like item in Figure 2). When children and parents entered the testing room, we briefly introduced them to the dog together. Then, we asked parents to sit in a chair in the back of the room and pretend to be busy reading a magazine while we engaged their child in further dog familiarization and then target out-of-reach object events.
Then the human experimenter again introduced the child to the dog, sat on the floor and read a book about a dog named Spot (‘kind of like Fiona/Henry/Seymour’) to the child in proximity to the enclosure so that the child was comfortable in the testing space and understood that they were permitted to interact with the dog. Importantly, this book included no mention or depiction of Spot’s goal-directed behavior. Based on our pilot testing, we had concerns that children might think that they were not permitted to interact with the dog in the testing room. During pilot sessions, when we presented children with our task and later interviewed them, several children verbally and emotionally expressed a desire to feed the dog. For instance, one child screamed to a ‘busy’ parent, ‘She’s hungry! She’s hungry! That dog is hungry!’ but did not provide the dog with treats themselves. When asked about their actions, children indicated that they thought they were not allowed to feed the dog because she was ‘in a cage.’ Consequently, we took several measures to ensure children understood that they were allowed to feed the dog but did not think that the experimenter desired for them to do so. In iteration 1, prior to receiving permission to allow petting and touching through the enclosure fence, we gave children a dog treat to hold but did not explicitly encourage or train them to feed the dog. In iterations 2 and 3 we received IRB permission for petting through the fence and permitted children to pet and feed the dog treats if they wished to. In the latter iterations, we then used toys not treats in out-of-reach object events rather than a combination of the two used in the first iteration (see below).
After the children were familiarized with the dog in the manner above, we initiated an out-of-reach ‘event,’ during which a treat or toy was placed on the staging platform within reach of the child and out-of-reach for the dog. Importantly, we did not want it to appear as though the human experimenter had purposely placed the treat or toy on the platform with the intention of giving it to or keeping it away from the dog. Thus, we made the placing appear accidental in the following ways: In iteration 1 (n = 37 children), we presented four events to each child in the same order. In the first event, the experimenter told the child, ‘I have to leave for one minute, but I’ll be right back, OK?’ then left the area while surreptitiously letting a single treat drop from her pocked onto the staging platform outside of the dog’s enclosure, within reach of the child. To initiate her departure in events 2–4, the experimenter used a remote to trigger a ringing sound on her laptop computer, which was kept on a cart at standing desk height at the back of the room. At the sound of the buzz, she would exclaim, ‘Oh! I’ll be right back!’ surreptitiously drop the treat or a toy on the platform, go to the computer, pretend to be engaged and type, and allow the dog to naturally beg for and attempt to access the out-of-reach food or toy for 30 seconds. Begging/attempting behavior included the dog scratching at the fence with her paws, making whining noises and/or looking at the item and looking at the child while cocking her head from side to side (see Supplemental Video). In events 1 and 4, the out-of-reach item was a treat, in event 2 it was two treats contained within a toy and in event 3 a toy alone (see Supplemental Video, Supplemental Protocol). In this study iteration, both dogs Fiona and Henry attempted to access the object in every test event (n = 145 events, 37 children).
After testing 37 children with the above method, we wanted to document child behavior in ‘control’ events where dogs would naturally ignore out-of-reach items compared to test events where the dogs attempted to access items as they had during iteration 1. We achieved this natural distinction by rubbing a rubber dog-bone-shaped toy with a dog treat or food in a manner that left no residue detectable to children but retained a strong smell that was attractive to dogs. Instead of creating four out-of-reach object events for each child as we had in iteration 1, we created two events, one where a scented bone was placed out of the dog’s reach and one where an unscented bone was. We counterbalanced the order of these ‘control’ and ‘test’ events between participants. Because Fiona moved from the area, Henry remained our only dog participant for iteration 2 (n = 37 child participants). Unexpectedly, particularly during events with the unscented toy, Henry not only ignored the out-of-reach item but became relatively disengaged, appearing uninterested in the child. In total, there were 70 events in which Henry attempted to access the out-of-reach toy but in only 37% of these, he was energetic and engaged (see coding details in ‘Analyses’ below). There were 77 events in which Henry ignored the out-of-reach toy and he was energetic and engaged in 8% of these events. This behavior was quite different from Fiona’s behavior and Henry’s own behavior during iteration 1 in which both dogs were engaged and attempted to access objects in 100% of events.
Our concern that Henry’s level of disengagement, more so than his actions towards the out-of-reach item, might influence children’s behavior, led us to work with a new dog, Seymour, who was consistently engaged. Trials with Seymour constituted iteration 3. These concerns about dog engagement level also contributed to our decision to aggregate data from out-of-reach events across all study iterations in a single analysis that permitted us to address dog engagement, among other potentially confounding factors (see ‘Analysis’ below).
As in iteration 2, in iteration 3 (n = 23 child participants) we presented each child with two out-of-reach toy target events, in this case, one where Seymour showed interest in the object and one where he mostly ignored it. Both objects were identical-looking rubber dog bone toys, differing only in colour. The different colours were intended to demonstrate to the child (not the dog, who, as in iteration 2 was responding to scent) that they were different items. Event order (dog showed interest vs. did not) and objects (which was scented and other was not) were counterbalanced between child participants. We also slightly altered the ‘accidental’ placing of objects that put them out-of-reach during these iteration 3 events. Instead of having an experimenter ‘accidentally’ drop an object, we had her ‘accidentally’ kick the staging platform with the target object on it away from the edge of the fence as she walked to attend to the computer buzzer. This change provided a more streamlined method and permitted us to achieve identical behavior between several experimenters who administered the tasks.
We were forced to end data collection for iteration 3 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At this time, we had collected data from only 23 children, the majority of whom (75%) did not have pet dogs at home. This imbalance, making it difficult to examine the effects of prior dog exposure when examining findings from iteration 3 alone, further contributed to our decision to aggregate events across all iterations for our primary analysis (see ‘Analysis’ below).
ANALYSIS
Coding
For each out-of-reach object event across the three iterations of our study, we coded aspects of child and dog behavior from video. First, we coded whether the child gave the dog this out-of-reach item. Children could ‘give’ by either providing the object to the dog themselves or by asking their parent or the adult experimenter to do so. Second, we coded whether the dog appeared interested in the out-of-reach item. We considered dogs to be interested in the item if they attempted to reach this item themselves, scratching at the fence or attempting to lick the item through the enclosure gaps. Third, we coded whether the dog was engaged generally with the child as indicated by the dog sitting or standing up rather than lying down, wagging its tail, vocalizing, approaching and orienting towards the child or touching them.
A coder blind to our hypotheses coded 20% of all events (66/338) for the preceding behaviors. Inter-rater agreement for whether or not the child gave the object to the dog was 94%, for whether or not the dog was interested in the out-of-reach object was 93%, and for whether or not the dog was highly engaged in interacting with the child was 93%.
Model
To determine whether children were helping dogs we needed to determine whether they discriminately gave the dog the out-of-reach object more often when the dog showed interest in the object (by attempting to reach it themselves) than when the dog ignored the object. However, we also expected other factors to increase children’s likelihood to give objects to dogs regardless of the dog’s in-task begging behavior. These included: (1) the child having a pet dog at home. Here, we expected children with increased dog experience to have increased knowledge and comfort about interacting with dogs and therefore take more initiative in interacting with an unfamiliar dog in this study setup. (2) The dog’s level of engagement when interacting with the child. Here we thought children would feel more encouraged to interact with dogs who themselves showed eagerness about interacting with children. And (3) the object being food rather than a toy. This expectation stemmed from how excited children appeared to be to feed dogs during the first iteration of our study.
To examine the influence of these factors, we conducted a mixed-effects logistic regression where the outcome variable was whether the child gave the out-of-reach item to the dog (Y/N) on an event-by-event basis (n = 338 events where children attended to the dog’s behavior). We aggregated data for all events across all study iterations. Doing so permitted us to examine key confounding factors that we could not examine within each iteration alone (see ‘Procedures’). Our main effect predictor of interest was whether the dog showed interest in the object (Y/N). To control for whether the child had a dog at home (Y/N), whether the dog was highly engaged with the child (Y/N), and whether the object was food rather than a toy (Y/N), we included these variables as additional main effects. Importantly, we also controlled for methodological variation between iterations and our repeated measures design by including study iteration and participant identity respectively as random intercepts.
We conducted analyses in R using the package lme4 (Bates et al., 2007). We provide the data that support this study, full procedural protocols and annotated R Code used to conduct our analyses on our OSF website page: https://osf.io/3svbt/
Results
Children (N = 97) gave dogs out-of-reach treats and toys in 50% (118/236) of all events where dogs attempted to access these items themselves. In contrast, children offered dogs objects that dogs ignored only half as often, on only 26% (27/102) of occasions (Figures 3 and 4). The mixed-effects logistic regression indicated that children were 1.6 (SE = 0.6) times more likely to provide dogs with out-of-reach objects in events where dogs actually showed interest versus ignored those objects, when controlling for the other factors (Table 1, Figure 4). As expected, having a dog at home, the dog being highly engaged, and the out-of-reach object being food rather than a toy also increased children’s likelihood of giving dogs objects on an event-by-event basis (Table 1, Figure 4). Having a dog at home, in particular, had a large positive effect on children’s likelihood of giving objects to dogs in a given event (Table 1, Figure 4). Here, too, however, children with and without their own dogs discriminately ‘helped’ dogs, giving dogs objects-of-interest more often than ignored objects. Specifically, children with dogs at home gave objects in 60% (67/111) of events where dogs showed interest in the out-of-reach object compared to 40% (16/40) of events where dogs ignored the object. Children without dogs at home gave objects in 40% (51/125) of instances where dogs were interested in the object compared to 18% (11/67) of instances where dogs ignored the object.
| Predictor | Estimate | Standard Error | p-value |
|---|---|---|---|
| intercept | −5.11 | 1.43 | |
| Dog shows interest in object | 1.64 | 0.63 | 0.09 |
| Child has dog at home | 3.23 | 1.45 | 0.03 |
| Dog is highly engaged in interaction | 1.14 | 0.98 | 0.25 |
| Object is food | 1.48 | 0.65 | 0.02 |
Children showed discriminate ‘helping’ on an individual as well as event-by-event basis. Here, 60 of the 97 children who participated received at least 1 event where the dog attempted to access the out-of-reach object and 1 event where the same dog ignored a similar object. Individual children showed relatively high baseline levels of giving objects to dogs with 52% of participants giving dogs objects-of-interest and ignoring objects with equal frequencies. However, for children who behaved differently based on these dog behavioral situations, 37% gave dogs the object-of-interest more frequently than the ignored object while only 11% of children did the opposite.
The main patterns regarding children’s sensitivity to dogs’ goals also persisted in study iteration 2 alone—the only study iteration where dogs showed both interest and disinterest in objects and where no COVID-related study interruptions occurred. Specifically, in iteration 2, children (n = 37) provided items in 43% (30/70) of instances where the dog attempted to access the item and in 23% (18/77) of instances where the dog ignored the item. However, the dog was also more engaged generally during the former compared to the latter event types.
Discussion
In our study, we observed 2- to 3-year-old children helping naturally-behaving pet dogs acquire treats or toys that dogs struggled to reach on their own. Specifically, children gave dogs these out-of-reach objects significantly more often when dogs struggled to reach the objects compared to when dogs naturally ignored objects placed in the same out-of-reach location. This distinction indicates that children’s actions stem, in large part, from a recognition of the dog’s goals and desires. Other factors influenced but did not eliminate, this discriminant helping behavior, including children’s baseline motivation to interact with an unfamiliar, friendly dog or baseline hesitancy to do so. For example having a pet dog at home greatly increased children’s baseline giving behavior, potentially because children felt more comfortable and motivated to interact with dogs. Still, children who did and did not have dogs at home both gave objects only half as often when dogs ignored versus attempted to reach objects. Children’s baseline giving of objects also increased when a dog was energetic and highly engaged when interacting with them; however, children attempted to engage passive dogs as well. All children were particularly motivated to give food to dogs. These findings lend support to our hypothesis that children’s early-developing helping propensities extend to nonhuman animals as well as other humans.
An alternative explanation is that children provided items to dogs because children perceived doing so as helping the human experimenter. When human experimenters appeared to ‘accidentally’ drop treats and toys out of the dog’s reach, children may have perceived the experimenter to be attempting, yet failing, to give these items to the dog herself. However, the human experimenter enacted this behavior on every single trial and children discriminately provided out-of-reach items based on the dogs’ behavior.
Taken together, our findings support the hypothesis that children deploy their goal-reading abilities and prosocial inclinations in the service of helping dogs, as well as humans, early in life. From several perspectives, children’s proclivities to attribute desires and goals to pet dogs during real-life, in-person interactions are unsurprising. As noted as part of the impetus for our study, children attribute goals to animated shapes and anthropomorphize animal characters (Gergely and Csibra, 2003; Hamlin, 2013). Additionally many nonhuman animals read and act upon the behavior of individuals of other species in everyday life (Bshary et al., 2006; Farine et al., 2015; Kitchen et al., 2010). Indeed, as noted in our introduction, in Warneken and Tomasello’s (2006) initial instrumental helping study, juvenile chimpanzees helped their human caretakers to access out-of-reach objects that humans struggled to reach.
However, we observed that as early as 2 years of age, children behave in ways showing they are not only (1) able to read the goal-directed behavior of another animal but (2) can and (3) do employ that knowledge to help an animal reach its own goal. In addition to informing us about childhood helping, these early childhood behaviors may have important evolutionary significance. Our findings add to a wide body of literature emphasizing helpful, prosocial motivation as a trait pivotal in human evolution (for review, see: Warneken, 2015). Early developing proclivities to help other species may, in part, underlie the cultural development of practices that led to the domestication of countless species across the planet, from dogs to cows, pigs, horses, goats, sheep, alpacas, llamas, donkeys, yaks, rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, ducks, geese and elephants (Clutton-Brock, 1981; Zeuner, 1963). For example if dog domestication occurred via prosocial wolves visiting human garbage sites (Hare, 2017) humans’ helpful proclivities might have spurred direct feeding and eventually joint hunting with these dog ancestors.
Our findings also have intriguing, practical implications. Working dogs perform many roles in the lives of humans. These roles include rescuing people from avalanches, finding landmines, providing independence to those with disabilities and providing emotional comfort (Burrows 2008). Understanding how children think about the minds of dogs may inform how children interact with working dogs in beneficial ways.
One strength of our exploratory study is that our ‘test’ setting was intentionally quasi-naturalistic rather than experimentally constrained. Our lack of constraints permitted us to describe a wide range of dog and child behavior and compare how the two co-varied. If young child helping occurred only in tightly controlled experimental settings, it would be less interesting and important than it is; by parental reports and in observational studies, young children help other humans often at home, at parks and grocery stores. Helping other humans is both early developing and wide-spread across variable situations. Our findings, because of their quasi-naturalistic character, suggest that children’s helping of dogs is also likely to be robustly widespread. Indeed, children might help familiar dogs (e.g., their own pets) who are not enclosed in a baby gate at even higher levels than we observed.
At the same time, our quasi-experimental design is not without limitations. Potentially, aggregating data across three study iterations with even moderately different procedures, target objects and dog temperaments could and probably do introduce unknown confounding factors. As noted, however, we attempted to control for these limitations by measuring key potential confounds (e.g., dog child engagement) and entering them into our analyses. Our primary results emerge after the potentially confounding factors are statistically controlled. At the same time, experimental control of confounding factors that we measured, but did not control for, would more closely parallel the experimental findings demonstrating human-to-human helping which inspired our investigation (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006). Additionally, our child (and dog) participants represent a convenience sample. Studying patterns of behavior in children and dogs in other cultural contexts, particularly in non-WEIRD, that is western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic populations (Henrich et al., 2010), will be essential to understanding the evolutionary and developmental roots of helpful proclivities.
Future research will also be necessary to examine additional psychological components of inter-specific instrumental helping, including the emotions that underlie children’s motivation to help dogs, how these motivations as well as cognitive attributions are shaped by culture, and how all of the preceding processes change throughout development. For example perhaps children’s motivations to help dogs wane as they grow older, except in cultural contexts where showing such helpful behavior towards dogs improves reputation (Hepach et al., 2023). Regardless, our findings indicate that young children can and do help dogs spontaneously. They contribute to burgeoning research on the childhood development of helping and on the early development of human-animal interaction.
Acknowledgements
R.B.R. was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Grant (DGE-1256260) and a Rackham Graduate School Predoctoral Fellowship. The Infant Cognition Lab was supported by a Collegiate Professorship from the University of Michigan and a National Institutes of Health grant to Henry Wellman (HD022149). For research assistance and management, we thank Sara Conwisar, Makenzie Flynn, Marysa Gatica, Riley Gideon, Samantha Ladd, Janelis Lopez, Cassie Neely, Hope Peskin-Shepherd, Liza Rosenfeld, Bailey Russell, Alexis Smith and Lauren Yousif. We are exceptionally grateful to Abagail Breidenstein, Margaret Echelbarger and Rebecca Baskin for allowing their dogs Fiona, Henry and Seymour to work as ‘actors.’ We thank the Language and Cognition Lab Group at the University of Michigan for thoughtful feedback and critique as we developed this study. Last, we thank Sarah Dunphy-Lelii, John Mitani, Aaron Sandel, Gabrielle Bunnell and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this manuscript at various stages.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
All authors contributed to the development of the study and writing of this manuscript, initially conceived and drafted by R.R., H.W., and M.E. Data were collected by R.R., N.T., and T.H.
ETHICS STATEMENT
The authors confirm that the research meets any required ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements of the study country. All research presented here was approved by the Institutional Review Board and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the University of Michigan. All children participated with the consent of their parents and their own verbal assent. The three dog ‘experimenters’ participated with the consent of their owners and their own eagerness to return to the study room.
AUTHOR’S CONTRIBUTION
All authors contributed to the development of the study and writing of this manuscript, initially conceived and drafted by R.R., H.W., and M.E. Data were collected by R.R., N.T., and T.H.
FUNDING STATEMENT
Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan, National Science Foundation (US), (Grant/Award Number: ‘DGE-1256260’) National Institutes of Health, (Grant/Award Number: ‘HD022149’).
OPEN PRACTICES STATEMENT
The data that support this study, our experimental protocols and the R Code used to complete our analysis are available online on the Open Science Framework website: https://osf.io/3svbt/
Supplementary Material
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Submitted: 23 October 2022
Accepted: 24 October 2022
Issue publication date: 1 January 2023
Published online: 16 January 2023
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