Animals | Interview with the Authors—Prof. Dr. Péter Pongrácz and Ms. Petra Dobos

We recently had the opportunity to interview Prof. Dr. Péter Pongrácz and Ms. Petra Dobos about their paper, “Would You Detour with Me? Association between Functional Breed Selection and Social Learning in Dogs Sheds Light on Elements of Dog–Human Cooperation”, which was published in Animals (ISSN: 2076-2615) in 2023 and has received a significant amount of positive feedback from readers.

The following is a brief interview with Prof. Dr. Péter Pongrácz and Ms. Petra Dobos:

1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your current research?
PD: I’m Petra Dobos. I’m a master's student at the Department of Ethology of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. I’m currently studying dogs' self-representation in a body awareness scenario that also includes the opportunity for social learning. In this experiment, we provide an obstacle for dogs of different sizes to test their body awareness with variously sized openings. Additionally, we also provide a human demonstration of an alternative solution: to detour around the obstacle. We want to see the effect of social learning and body-size representation on dogs’ decision-making. We also examine the breed effect in this context.

PP: I’m Peter Pongracz. I joined the research group at the Department of Ethology of Eötvös Loránd University back in 2000, which is a world-leading authority on dog cognition. Since then, I have conducted research on multiple topics, mostly on dogs, but lately more and more on cats as cat ethology is an underrepresented field and there are a lot of challenges and opportunities in it. Social learning has always been one of my favorite topics, and lately, in the last 5-6 years, self-representation has also become a very interesting subject for me. What is most important to me and what I try to influence my students toward is to ask biologically relevant questions in ethology. We must always ask the question, what is the advantage for that animal to behave in a particular way? Because this behavior was at least partially shaped by evolution, and the animals could also learn something that is useful to them, so asking these kinds of questions is very important in ecologically valid research.

2. What inspired you to conduct this research?
PP: I published the first paper on dog social learning using the detour paradigm in 2001. Since then, we have had several additional research results on social learning in dogs. What really inspired me to think about it was, what would be the effect of dog breeds on social learning in dogs, and it was basically a two-fold inspiration.
Firstly, dog breeds and their behavior are very interesting for scientists and enthusiasts alike. In addition, a more important reason is that there are many results on dog social learning, but we still know relatively little about factors that would influence dogs’ performance in a social learning task. Specifically, regarding this detour paradigm, very few factors have been investigated so far. We know a few things such as how the hierarchy of dogs influences performance, but beyond that, we do not know too much. This was a moment for me that made me think, I would like to learn more about this important topic—how breed effects influence dogs’ performance in social learning.

PD: I think when a researcher finds a knowledge gap in an interesting topic, we just want to fill it. For example, in terms of our more recent paper, we had a gap, and we found a method for how to conduct the research in a precise and relevant way. In our research, we wanted to compare the effect of neutral intonation speech and ostensive speech demonstration on the different dog breed groups. From our research that we published in Animals in 2023, we couldn’t tell if dogs from the so-called cooperative breeds were sensitive to the human demonstrator because of her ostensive communication or were just sensitive to the sight of humans in general. We are still conducting further research to find this out, which is one of our ongoing inspirations.

3. What do you think made the academic community respond so well to your research?
PD: It is a very important topic for dog owners, dog trainers, and for researchers. This is why it probably got such good feedback from readers. Dogs’ social learning and interactions with humans is a very significant topic, also in terms of the breed of dog. A lot of people want to have purebred dogs, they want to decide which breed to choose, and thanks to that research, they can make a better choice.
It is relevant that the functionally different breeds (such as the independent and cooperative working dogs) behave differently when interacting with humans. I think it is applicable knowledge for owners as well when they want to choose a breed that is more dependent or a breed that is rather independent.

PP: Both social learning and researching dog breeds’ effect on behavior are two very popular topics. However, nobody so far had connected these two subjects together—this type of research was missing. This is not simply a study where we investigated the breed effect, but most importantly, dog breeds were grouped into two main clusters, both in which there were a large number of dog breeds. One is cooperative breeds, and the other is independent. These two clusters allow us to put forward ecologically valid questions because the various dog breeds that belong together in these clusters have a common way of behaving towards humans due to the functional selection done many, many years ago. Now, we are investigating the effect of this past functional selection on dogs’ behavior while they are interacting with humans.
We put a very big emphasis on this research to create a wide and unbiased representation of dog breeds. We put a lot of effort into this, and this is probably one more reason why many people are referring to that article.

4. What do you think are the future directions for your research?
PD: We conducted more research on the mechanisms and influencing factors of social learning among dog breeds and we found that cooperative dog breeds indeed paid more attention to the human demonstrator and are more sensitive not only to ostensive speech but also to neutral intonation. This means that we grab their attention with specific words and tone as well. For my current research, I am investigating social learning in body awareness scenarios. In the future, I would like to delve deeper into the investigation of self-representation, but I think social learning is a very important aspect of dog–human interactions for me.

PP: If I could plan in the future, I would concentrate on particular components and how they separately influence both social learning and self-representation. We would like to combine these two into a more complex picture, which is in fact a very hard challenge, to test two or more factors at once. Dogs' lifetime experience and training background, for example, how well would dogs perform in problem-solving tasks who were trained to do specific jobs, how would aging affect their performance, etc.

5. Why did you choose Animals as the best platform for your work?
PP: I have to say that I’m very impressed with Animals as a scientific journal. It’s a pleasant thing to see that the journal is ranked Q1. In my experience, and I’m publishing in many journals, I have never met with a journal with such a fast publication procedure as Animals and at the same time with the scientific quality of the reviewing process as well.
In my experience, the review reports we get from reviewers are professional and helpful. It’s a journal of high reputation. I know many high-profile colleagues from the field of dog behavioral research who regularly publish in Animals. For us, the Animals journal was there at the right time, when we had just finished the experiments, run the statistics, and finalized the article, so for us, it was Animals or nothing at that moment.

6. What advice would you give to young scholars who are looking to get into research?
PD: It’s important to seek out mentors who will help you in your career and have the same interests as you and the same attitude. Of course, it’s important in every level of research to share your thoughts together and find the people who can support you. For young scholars, it is important to persist in what you do. If you find an interesting topic, you shouldn’t give up on it, even if you don’t have the funds for it. And if you find just one person who can support you, even if it rains, even if it snows, the hard work will pay off. Never giving up and persisting with research are the most important things.

PP: Everybody gets to the point when they start to ask, “Why am I doing it? Does it have any meaning? It seems silly”, etc., and this can be true for any researcher. What I said to Petra is, to think about what we are doing now, for this research and experiment, what we are doing, no one has done it before. So, it is the first time that these particular research questions will be answered. And this is basically the life of a scholar.
We answered these questions, and we published the answers. This is the best thing for the researcher. This little research has our names on it. This is our touch on the vast knowledge that humans have. This should be the researchers’ driving force. It is a lot of work, and it can sometimes be hard and disappointing; eventually, your touch will be there. If you feel the motivation from this, nobody can stop you.