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

Abstract

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 samePLFs. 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.

Visual perception of emotion cues in dogs: a critical review of methodologies

“…Moreover, research has concentrated on how dogs perceive facial emotion cues, due to the face being crucial in human–human interactions, but little is known about what cues are important from the dog’s perspective. Dogs communicate much more with their bodies (e.g., play bow, Bekoff 1977 ; Byosiere et al 2016 ; Horowitz 2009 ), and there is evidence that full body motion is significant for dogs (Delanoeije et al 2020 ; Eatherington et al 2019 ; Ishikawa et al 2018 ; Kovács et al 2016 ). Even though humans still communicate a lot of emotion information with their bodies (e.g., Martinez et al 2016 ), faces with emotional cues are more important or informative for humans than for dogs (e.g., Correia-Caeiro et al 2021 ).…”

Deep learning-based activity recognition and fine motor identification using 2D skeletons of cynomolgus monkeys

“…In clinical applications, action recognition has been widely utilized in stroke rehabilitation using dynamical analysis of motion ( Venkataraman et al, 2013 ) and in assessing parkinsonism severity through gait-based characteristic recognition ( Ricciardi et al, 2019 ). Studies on action recognition in non-human animals were first applied in pigeons ( Dittrich & Lea, 1993 ), cats ( Blake, 1993 ), and dogs ( Delanoeije et al, 2020 ). Monkeys boast a greater range of motor behaviors compared to other experimental animals, as each of their body joints exhibits multiple degrees of freedom, enabling the production of a diverse array of postures.…”

Dogs’ ability to follow temporarily invisible moving objects: the ability to track and expect is shaped by experience

“…Only recently some studies have started to look into this topic, exploring some basic sensory features of dogs' motion perception, such as the detection of coherent motion (Kanizsár et al 2017(Kanizsár et al , 2018 and the minimum detectable velocity (Lõoke et al 2020). Other researchers have focused on dogs' perception of biological motion, suggesting that dogs are sensitive to it (Delanoeije et al 2020;Eatherington et al 2019;Kovács et al 2016), although with peculiarities with regards to which features are relevant in determining dogs' attention to biological motion (Eatherington et al 2021). Two recent studies have also looked into dogs´ ability to track moving objects (Völter et al 2020;Völter and Huber 2021a).…”