Science

Pop culture holds that if you’re trapped in a well, Lassie will lead the way to a rescue—but if you’re stuck with Garfield, you’d better have some lasagna in your pocket. And research suggests such stereotypes aren’t far off.

Scientists compared 19 children between 16 and 24 months old with 38 untrained pet dogs and 22 cats, asking a simple question: Who will spontaneously respond when a human appears to need help? In the experiment, a familiar caregiver—the child’s parent or the pet’s owner—interacted with a sponge before turning away. Then an experimenter hid it in full view of the study subject. Across three trials of decreasing difficulty—when the sponge was unreachable and covered, then visible but out of reach, then fully reachable—the person searched, repeating, “I can’t find it. What should I do?” but never directly addressing the subject.

In the findings described in Animal Behaviour, all three groups paid similar levels of attention. But children and dogs were more likely to show helping-related behaviors—approaching, indicating or retrieving the object for the person. By the final trial, more than half the dogs and nearly half the toddlers indicated the object’s location, and some also brought it to the caregiver. Cats never approached it and only rarely indicated its location.