Head-Mounted Mobile Eye-Tracking in the Domestic Dog: A New Method

Abstract

Humans rely on dogs for countless tasks, ranging from companionship to highly specialized detection work. In their daily lives, dogs must navigate a human-built visual world, yet comparatively little is known about what dogs visually attend to as they move through their environment. Real-world eye-tracking, or head-mounted eye-tracking, allows participants to freely move through their environment, providing more naturalistic results about visual attention while interacting with objects and agents. In dogs, real-world eye-tracking has the potential to inform our understanding of cross-species cognitive abilities as well as working dog training, however a robust and easily deployed head-mounted eye-tracking method for dogs has not previously been developed and tested. We present a novel method for real-world eye-tracking in dogs, using a simple head-mounted mobile apparatus mounted onto goggles designed for dogs. This new method, adapted from systems that are widely used in humans, allows for eye-tracking during more naturalistic behaviors, namely walking around and interacting with real-world stimuli, as well as reduced training time as compared to traditional stationary eye-tracking methods. We found that while completing a simple forced-choice treat-finding task, dogs look primarily to the treat, and we demonstrated the accuracy of this method using alternative gaze-tracking methods. Additionally, eye-tracking revealed more fine-grained time course information and individual differences in looking patterns.

Why do dogs wag their tails?

“…-test the perception of tail wagging parameters in humans and dogs (and ideally in non-human primates and other canids as well) through neuroimaging and physiological studies (e.g. expose both humans and dogs to tail wagging dogs and measure attention parameters such as eye fixations) [111][112][113][114].…”

Unveiling Causal Attention in Dogs' Eyes with Smart Eyewear

“…Following MemX [12], we first apply Gaussian Relaxation to convert those gaze points g 𝑗 into heatmaps and apply them as visual masks on the corresponding scene images. The intuition is to focus the model on regions closer to the gaze points, as the locations near the gaze points are areas of potential interest to subjects [12,61]. This can be denoted as I ′ 𝑖 = VM(I 𝑖 , g 𝑖 ) where I ′ 𝑖 is the masked scene image at step 𝑖, and VM refers to this Visual Masking processing.…”

“…The world camera is essentially an Insta360 GO 2 (1920×1080@30fps) camera that collects the visual contents adjusted with the canine's FoV. We capture 30 frames per second in this work, as this is adequate for detecting dig eye movement patterns such as fixations, the durations of which are typically longer than 100 ms [61,74]. A higher frame rate would unnecessarily reduce battery lifespan.…”

“…Eye-tracking is a primary step toward exploring causal attention in dogs. Existing eye-tracking methods [42,61] typically use an infrared camera to record the subject's eyes and use an IR LED light to illuminate the iris to detect eye-related features, such as the pupil center. The light conditions of outdoor environments can reduce the performance of such eye-tracking methods when compared to indoor environments.…”