| Summary: | Research in recent decades has shown that dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) stand out among the animal kingdom with their abilities to understand and use human social-cooperative communication. In this regard, they even outperform our closest wild relatives, the great apes, as well as their wild ancestors, wolves. For the assessment of cognitive abilities, mostly so-called object-choice task study formats are used, in which the participants choose from one of two or more opaque options and among one of these options is the wanted object (food, toy, .), which has to be found and to which the human has previously given a hint (e.g. pointing gesture). However, several cues are usually presented in combination and still kept present during the animal's choice. In our study, we investigate the influence of an ostensive setting on the understanding of the human pointing gesture of 91 privately owned dogs. Here, the dynamic gesture is the only available cue. The dogs performed significantly better in both test situations than would have been expected by chance, again achieving a marginally significantly higher success in the ostensive test situation than in the non-ostensive test situation. This suggests that dogs perceive the human pointing gesture as a social-communicative act rather than a pure imperative (command). However, other studies show that gaze tracking seems to be a significant information provider or reinforcer for dogs, which could explain why our results were not as strong as expected. Diplomarbeit - Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien - 2023 Die Forschung der letzten Jahrzehnte hat gezeigt, dass Hunde (Canis lupus familiaris) mit ihren Fähigkeiten, menschlich sozial-kooperative Kommunikation zu verstehen und anzuwenden, aus der Tierwelt herausstechen. Dabei übertreffen sie sogar unsere engsten wildlebenden Verwandten, die Menschenaffen, als auch ihre wilden Vorfahren, die Wölfe. Zur Einschätzung der kognitiven Fähigkeiten werden zumeist sogenannte Objektwahlaufgaben-Studienformate herangezogen, bei ...
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