Dogs (Canis familiaris) prioritize independent exploration over looking back.

It has been suggested that over the course of domestication, dogs developed the propensity to "look back" or gaze at humans when they encounter a challenging task. Unfortunately, little work to date has addressed the question of why dogs look back. To explore this issue, we conducted 3 experiments in which dogs had the option of doing something other than looking back at their owner when encountering an unsolvable task. In Experiments 1 and 2, dogs could look back or attempt an alternative puzzle. In both experiments, dogs attempted the alternative puzzle prior to looking back. In Experiment 3, when dogs encountered the unsolvable task, they could look back or attempt to solve the same puzzle using an alternate approach. As in Experiments 1 and 2, dogs attempted the alternate approach prior to looking back. Although some scholars have suggested that dogs may look back because they are overly reliant on humans, our findings suggest that dogs may instead prioritize independent exploration over looking back. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Do Dogs Prefer Helpers in an Infant-Based Social Evaluation Task?

Social evaluative abilities emerge in human infancy, highlighting their importance in shaping our species' early understanding of the social world. Remarkably, infants show social evaluation in relatively abstract contexts: for instance, preferring a wooden shape that helps another shape in a puppet show over a shape that hinders another character (Hamlin et al., 2007). Here we ask whether these abstract social evaluative abilities are shared with other species. Domestic dogs provide an ideal animal species in which to address this question because this species cooperates extensively with conspecifics and humans and may thus benefit from a more general ability to socially evaluate prospective partners. We tested dogs on a social evaluation puppet show task originally used with human infants. Subjects watched a helpful shape aid an agent in achieving its goal and a hinderer shape prevent an agent from achieving its goal. We examined (1) whether dogs showed a preference for the helpful or hinderer shape, (2) whether dogs exhibited longer exploration of the helpful or hinderer shape, and (3) whether dogs were more likely to engage with their handlers during the helper or hinderer events. In contrast to human infants, dogs showed no preference for either the helper or the hinderer, nor were they more likely to engage with their handlers during helper or hinderer events. Dogs did spend more time exploring the hindering shape, perhaps indicating that they were puzzled by the agent's unhelpful behavior. However, this preference was moderated by a preference for one of the two shapes, regardless of role. These findings suggest that, relative to infants, dogs show weak or absent social evaluative abilities when presented with abstract events and point to constraints on dogs' abilities to evaluate others' behavior.

Social decoys: Leveraging choice architecture to alter social preferences.

Many of society's most significant social decisions are made over sets of individuals: for example, evaluating a collection of job candidates when making a hiring decision. Rational theories of choice dictate that decision makers' preferences between any two options should remain the same irrespective of the number or quality of other options. Yet people's preferences for each option in a choice set shift in predictable ways as function of the available alternatives. These violations are well documented in consumer behavior contexts: for example, the decoy effect, in which introducing a third inferior product changes consumers' preferences for two original products. The current experiments test the efficacy of social decoys and harness insights from computational models of decision-making to examine whether choice set construction can be used to change preferences in a hiring context. Across seven experiments (N = 6312) we find that participants have systematically different preferences for the exact same candidate as a function of the other candidates in the choice set (Experiments 1a-1d, 2) and the salience of the candidate attributes under consideration (Experiments 2, 3a, 3b). Specifically, compromise and (often) asymmetric-dominance decoys increased relative preference for their yoked candidates when candidates were counterstereotypical (e.g., high warmth/low competence male candidate). More importantly, we demonstrate for the first time that we can mimic the effect of a decoy in the absence of a third candidate by manipulating participants' exposure to candidates' attributes: balanced exposure to candidates' warmth and competence information significantly reduced bias between the two candidates. (PsycINFO Database Record

Spontaneous calcium spike activity in embryonic spinal neurons is regulated by developmental expression of the Na+, K+-ATPase beta3 subunit.

Different types and patterns of spontaneous electrical activity drive many aspects of neuronal differentiation. Neurons in the developing Xenopus spinal cord exhibit calcium spikes, which regulate gene transcription and neurotransmitter specification. The ionic currents necessary for spike production have been described. However, the mechanisms that generate the onset of this activity and the basis of its regulation remain unclear. Although signaling molecules appear to act on plasma membrane receptors to trigger calcium spike activity, other mechanisms for spontaneous calcium spike regulation may exist as well. Here, we analyze the developmental expression of the Na(+), K(+)-ATPase beta3 subunit in Xenopus tropicalis embryos and show that its levels are downregulated at a time during embryonic development that coincides with the onset of prominent calcium spike activity in spinal neurons. Inhibition of an earlier increase in beta3 expression leads to more depolarized resting membrane potentials and results in later reduction of spike activity. This suppression of beta3 levels also reduces expression of the store-operated calcium channel subunit, Orai1. These findings suggest that the Na(+), K(+)-ATPase plays a role in initiating calcium spike activity and regulating calcium homeostasis.