Social looking in the domestic dog

The study of dog social cognition is relatively recent and is rapidly developing, providing an interesting and multi-faceted picture of our ‘‘best friend’s’’ sociocognitive abilities. In particular, since Miklósi et al.’s (2003)seminal work ‘‘A simple reason for a big difference: wolves do not look back at humans, but dogs do’’, there has been a surge of interest in the area of dog–human communication. In the current chapter we focus on dogs’ comprehension of the human gaze and their ability to use human-directed-gazing as a communicative tool. We first review studies on the social significance of human eye contact for dogs, their understanding of eyes as indicators of attention, and their ability to take another’s visual perspective into account. We also consider dogs’ understanding of human eye-gaze as a communicative act, in terms of its potentially referential nature and as an ostensive cue signalling the communicative intent of the actor. We then move on to review studies on dogs’ human-directed gazing behaviour, discussing whether it may be considered part of an intentional and referential communicative act, what the underlying motivations and contexts in which this behaviour is exhibited may be, and what variables affect its occurrence. Where open questions remains, we outline current debates and highlight potential directions for future research.