Why dogs and their owners are so alike

From NewsScientist.com

• 01 August 2010
• Magazine issue 2771. Subscribe and save

DOG owners are said to resemble their pets - and perhaps with good reason. It seems dogs naturally match human gestures in a phenomenon known as automatic imitation.

People unconsciously copy the gestures of those around them. For example, a yawn will induce yawning in an observer, and a person looking skywards encourages passers-by to do the same. Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, and colleagues wanted to see whether dogs' actions, too, were influenced by humans. They trained dogs to open a sliding door with either their paw or mouth. One group of dogs were rewarded when they used the same method as their trainer, another when they used a different method to the trainer. The team found that the second group took more attempts to get the task right, suggesting that dogs are indeed subject to automatic imitation (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1142).

The findings support the idea that social animals automatically imitate others. However, Thomas Zentall of the University of Kentucky, Lexington, cautions that training is needed to bring out the trait. "It doesn't happen automatically," he says.

Original article here