Dog Human Communication Ability Summary

The Peer Review Article that I chose is called, “Do dogs get the point? A review of dog- human communication ability” by Juliane Kaminski and Marie Nitzschner which was available online June 6, 2013. This Article approach to dog's communication ability basically uses a lot of research that has already been performed to prove their point that, “dogs forms of communication may be more specialized than was predicted by some and may be best explained as the result of a special adaptation of dogs to the specific activities humans have used them for” (Kaminski,Nitzshner pg.294). To prove their initial hypothesis they bring about various experiments performed from 1995 to as recent as 2012 to explain that dogs can understand human gestures when …show more content…
Whereas the adaptation hypothesis just suggest that well dogs learned communicative skills as a specialization and it was not a selected trait so no further growth in social cognitive skills will occur. Then the paper goes on to speak about how “dogs seem to understand something about a humans, visual perspective” (Kaminski,Nitzshner pg.298). The evidence she proposes, she basically says that it is not supported and that dogs cognitively don’t understand humans in a human like way but understand the basic needs. Dogs also seem to show certain cues that human babies do only when it is something that they are interested to rather than all the time. This forms many other ideas and certain questions that I feel were not approached in the paper in entirely. I think it was a good paper dealing with communication, but when dealing with human communication I wonder why persons who have to interact with dogs were not tested. The test conducted in Udell suggested, “that if adult wolves was socialized intensively they could outperform dogs” (Kaminski,Nitzshner pg.295). If this is true, then my question would be could the nurturing a of a pup as a baby cause an enhancement in