It's a question that has perplexed many a pet owner -- how do their dogs seem to know who is most likely to pass them food under the table?
Now scientists think the answer lies in their willingness to accept us as social companions.
A team from the University of Florida found dogs who had more contact with humans were far better at picking up on physical and verbal cues, suggesting they watched and assimilated their behaviour.
This could explain why your pooch is more likely to misbehave when you're not looking.
Lead author Monique Udell, carried out two experiments comparing the performance of pet domestic dogs, shelter dogs and wolves given the opportunity to beg for food, from either an attentive person or from a person unable to see the animal.
They wanted to know whether the rearing and living environment of the animal (shelter or human home), or the species itself (dog or wolf), had the greater impact on the animal's performance.
They showed, for the first time that wolves, like domestic dogs, are capable of begging successfully for food by approaching the attentive human.
This demonstrates that both species -- domesticated and non-domesticated -- have the capacity to behave in accordance with a human's attentional state. In addition, both wolves and pet dogs were able to rapidly improve their performance with practice. But the authors also found that dogs were not sensitive to all visual cues of a human's attention in the same way.
Dogs from a home environment were more sensitive to stimuli predicting attentive humans than those from a shelter. Those dogs with less regular exposure to humans performed badly on the begging task. Reporting in Springer's journal Learning & Behavior, the researchers wrote: 'These results suggest that dogs' ability to follow human actions stems from a willingness to accept humans as social companions.
'This is combined with conditioning to follow the limbs and actions of humans to acquire reinforcement.
'The type of attentional cues, the context in which the command is presented, and previous experience are all important.'
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