Dogs fail to recognize a human pointing gesture in two-dimensional depictions of motion cues

Pupil size changes reveal dogs’ sensitivity to motion cues

“…Previous studies with dogs already found some evidence that they are sensitive to biological motion ( Eatherington et al., 2019 , 2021 ; Ishikawa et al., 2018 ; Kovács et al., 2016 ), direction changes to avoid collisions with an obstacle ( Tauzin et al., 2017 ), and chasing-like movement patterns ( Abdai et al., 2017a , 2017b , 2020 ). Our previous study on contact causality further suggested that dogs discriminate launching events in which the movement of a ball stimulus resulted from a collision event from control events in which a ball started moving without any obvious external cause ( Völter and Huber, 2021a ).…”

“…Eatherington et al (2019) found no effect for lateral human point-light walkers but the dogs showed increased looking times to upright dog point-light walkers than inverted ones (however, there was no difference when compared with scrambled stimuli). Dogs also failed to follow a human pointing gesture just based on a point-light walker display (Eatherington et al, 2021). How dogs perceive biological motion cues remains therefore controversial (at least in the context of point-light stimuli).…”

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).…”

“…The paradigm builds on the idea that exposure to an inconsistent sequence of two events involving the phenomenon under study should lead to a surprised reaction (Winters et al 2015). In dogs, surprise is often operationalized as a longer time spent looking at the inconsistent pairing, compared to the consistent one (Adachi et al 2007;Mongillo et al 2021;Pattison et al 2010Pattison et al , 2013West and Young 2002;Zentall and Pattison 2016). The methodology has been applied to several aspects of dogs' cognition and perception, including numerical competence (West and Young 2002), recognition of conspecifics (Mongillo et al 2021) and humans (Adachi et al 2007), size and color consistency (Pattison et al 2013) and object permanence (Pattison et al 2010;Zentall and Pattison 2016).…”

“…In dogs, surprise is often operationalized as a longer time spent looking at the inconsistent pairing, compared to the consistent one (Adachi et al 2007;Mongillo et al 2021;Pattison et al 2010Pattison et al , 2013West and Young 2002;Zentall and Pattison 2016). The methodology has been applied to several aspects of dogs' cognition and perception, including numerical competence (West and Young 2002), recognition of conspecifics (Mongillo et al 2021) and humans (Adachi et al 2007), size and color consistency (Pattison et al 2013) and object permanence (Pattison et al 2010;Zentall and Pattison 2016). The same paradigm has also been applied in studies using moving and disappearing objects, although not aimed at investigating dogs' ability to process motion information per se.…”