What do dogs (Canis familiaris) see? A review of vision in dogs and implications for cognition research

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, a large amount of research has been conducted in an attempt to uncover the cognitive abilities of the domestic dog. While substantial advancements have been made, progress has been impeded by the fact that little is known about how dogs visually perceive their external environment. It is imperative that future research determines more precisely canine visual processing capabilities, particularly considering the increasing number of studies assessing cognition via paradigms requiring vision. This review discusses current research on visual cognition and emphasizes the importance of understanding dog visual processing. We review several areas of vision research in domestic dogs, such as sensitivity to light, visual perspective, visual acuity, form perception, and color vision, with a focus on how these abilities may affect performance in cognition tasks. Additionally, we consider the immense diversity seen in dog morphology and explore ways in which these physical differences, particularly in facial morphology, may result in, or perhaps even be caused by, different visual processing capacities in dogs. Finally, we suggest future directions for research in dog vision and cognition.

On the Face of It: No Differential Sensitivity to Internal Facial Features in the Dog Brain

“…Comparing heads with a wide variety of objects/scenes instead of a more restricted category (e.g., houses), may intoduce an unintended bias, as heads are more uniform in regard to their shape than the shape of different everyday objects. All of the above mentioned dog fMRI studies presented two-dimensional still images stimuli, but it has not been established whether or not dogs (whose visual capacities differ from that of humans) perceive basic two-dimensional stimuli in the same way as they do in case of three-dimensional stimuli (Byosiere et al, 2018).…”

The effect of experience and of dots’ density and duration on the detection of coherent motion in dogs

“…Dogs make extensive use of visual information, in tasks as simple as recognizing their owner (Mongillo et al 2017b), to more cognitively complex activities, such as understanding human communicative signs (reviewed by Kaminsky and Nitzchener 2013), attentional states (Gácsi et al 2004;Virányi et al 2004) and emotions (Albuquerque et al 2016;Nagasawa et al 2011). Notwithstanding the demonstrated importance of such sensory modality, research on the mechanisms underlying canine vision is far from being exhaustive (Byosiere et al 2017a). Most of the studies on the topic focused on the functional properties of eye structures, and their impact on basic characteristics of sight, like acuity, light sensitivity, and color discrimination.…”

Resting-state fMRI data of awake dogs (Canis familiaris) via group-level independent component analysis reveal multiple, spatially distributed resting-state networks

“…Dogs' vision is inferior to that of primates, but they still rely on vision under a wide range of light conditions, i.e. they are visual generalists 20 . Dogs single visual network may dissociate into subnetworks in case of a higher number of extracted components, but this was not the case for the applied network dimensionalities in our study (d=20 and 30).…”