Do dogs mind the dots? Investigating domestic dogs' (Canis familiaris) preferential looking at human‐shaped point‐light figures

It is generally assumed that dogs show increased attention towards humans. A major part of this includes attention towards visual cues such as bodily gestures. We tested empirically whether dogs are visually attentive towards human body movement. Based on methods from visual perception research in h...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ethology 2020-06, Vol.126 (6), p.637-650
Main Authors: Delanoeije, Joni, Gerencsér, Linda, Miklósi, Ádám, Rutz, Christian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
artificial stimuli
audiovisual priming
Dogs
dog–human interaction
Domestic animals
Human body
Human motion
Orientation behavior
point‐light stimuli
Visual perception
Visual stimuli
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:It is generally assumed that dogs show increased attention towards humans. A major part of this includes attention towards visual cues such as bodily gestures. We tested empirically whether dogs are visually attentive towards human body movement. Based on methods from visual perception research in humans, we used point‐light figures (PLFs) to investigate whether dogs attend to human body movement compared to other forms of motion. We investigated dogs' attentiveness towards vocalisation‐paired PLFs by adopting a preferential looking paradigm. Results indicate that dogs show increased attention towards vocalisation‐paired human‐shaped PLFs in comparison with inverted and non‐inverted scrambled configurations of the same PLFs. This increased attention, however, was only present in the case of PLFs that simulated a human in frontal orientation but not for PLFs in lateral orientation. We conclude that dogs prefer to look at PLFs of socially relevant (i.e. frontally facing) human body (i.e. natural) movement rather than scrambled (i.e. unnatural) displays. Our results indicate that PLFs may function as a promising tool to investigate dogs' visual perceptual preferences and mechanisms.
ISSN:0179-1613
1439-0310
DOI:10.1111/eth.13016