Our world is changing at high speed and animals struggle to adapt to such fast changes. Learning from
others can be one of the least expensive way to adapt to such changes. However, information provided
by others can also be misleading, so animals employ specific strategies to decide when, what, and from
whom to learn depending on the context. Free-ranging dogs live in groups in a varied and fast-changing
environment, thus providing a perfect model to investigate whether and how social dynamics affect the
use of social learning. First, we will observe how free-ranging dogs interact with one another to assess
the relationships between them. Then, to test whether free-ranging dogs learn from others and what type
of information they learn, we will run non-invasive field experiments. We will introduce new tasks
where dogs need to show a specific behaviour to have access to food (e.g. a box with a door that needs
to be opened to obtain the food). We will use three different tasks, varying in complexity. We will
measure whether dogs prefer to learn alone or after observing others, and whether they learn preferably
from some partners than from others (e.g. partners with whom they are more closely bonded). We will
also test if dogs adopt a behavior that is shown by the majority of other individuals, by testing puppies
joining a group after weaning, as well as adults migrating to a new group. As pet dogs have the ability
to learn from other individuals, we hypothesize that also free-ranging dogs will learn from others when
facing novel challenges. More specifically, when presented with a series of novel tasks: 1) dogs will
learn socially from other dogs who already know how to solve the task; 2) this will result in the diffusion
of the novel behavior in the group; 3) the pattern of the diffusion will be dependent on the bonds between
individuals; 4) puppies as well as 5) migrating adults will learn from other individuals when joining a
new group; 6) dogs will learn socially depending on how complex is the task. This is the first project
investigating social learning in free-ranging dogs, where measures of dogs social dynamics can be
included. Thanks to the fact that free-ranging dogs are used to eat different type of food that can be
accessed in simple or complex ways, we can explore the potential to learn from others across different
tasks.