One key aspect of social cognition is the ability to assess the competence of other agents and then use this information to predict future behaviour. Current research shows that humans assess competence in a highly sophisticated manner. Our species is capable of taking third-party, relative observations of agent’s competencies and then using them to make future predictions about the different behaviours of a single agent. To date, few studies have examined if non-human animals show these same features of competence assessment. Here, we find suggestive evidence that domestic dogs can use third-party observations of the relative competence of humans (at throwing or kicking a ball) to predict how far an experimenter will propel a ball in the future. This was despite the actual behaviour produced at test (a fake throw or kick) being identical, and dogs needing to assign different, action-specific competencies to the same agent for these two behaviours. Dogs therefore appear to display four behavioural signatures of human competence judgement, which suggests that the ability to make sophisticated competence judgements may not be unique to humans.

社会认知的一个关键方面是评估其他智能体的能力，然后使用这些信息来预测未来行为的能力。目前的研究表明，人类以高度复杂的方式评估能力。我们的物种能够对代理人的能力进行第三方的相对观察，然后利用它们对单个代理人的不同行为做出未来的预测。迄今为止，很少有研究检验非人类动物是否表现出这些相同的能力评估特征。在这里，我们发现了有启发性的证据，表明家犬可以利用第三方对人类相对能力（扔球或踢球）的观察来预测实验者将来将球推多远。尽管测试时产生的实际行为（假投掷或假踢）是相同的，并且狗需要分配不同的，同一代理人针对这两种行为的特定行动能力。因此，狗似乎表现出人类能力判断的四种行为特征，这表明做出复杂能力判断的能力可能并非人类所独有。