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Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans

Facial expressions are a core component of the emotional response of social mammals. In contrast to Darwin's original proposition, expressive facial cues of emotion appear to have evolved to be species-specific. Faces trigger an automatic perceptual process, and so, inter-specific emotion perce...

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Autores principales: Correia-Caeiro, Catia, Guo, Kun, Mills, Daniel S.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7181561/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32052285
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01348-5
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author Correia-Caeiro, Catia
Guo, Kun
Mills, Daniel S.
author_facet Correia-Caeiro, Catia
Guo, Kun
Mills, Daniel S.
author_sort Correia-Caeiro, Catia
collection PubMed
description Facial expressions are a core component of the emotional response of social mammals. In contrast to Darwin's original proposition, expressive facial cues of emotion appear to have evolved to be species-specific. Faces trigger an automatic perceptual process, and so, inter-specific emotion perception is potentially a challenge; since observers should not try to “read” heterospecific facial expressions in the same way that they do conspecific ones. Using dynamic spontaneous facial expression stimuli, we report the first inter-species eye-tracking study on fully unrestrained participants and without pre-experiment training to maintain attention to stimuli, to compare how two different species living in the same ecological niche, humans and dogs, perceive each other’s facial expressions of emotion. Humans and dogs showed different gaze distributions when viewing the same facial expressions of either humans or dogs. Humans modulated their gaze depending on the area of interest (AOI) being examined, emotion, and species observed, but dogs modulated their gaze depending on AOI only. We also analysed if the gaze distribution was random across AOIs in both species: in humans, eye movements were not correlated with the diagnostic facial movements occurring in the emotional expression, and in dogs, there was only a partial relationship. This suggests that the scanning of facial expressions is a relatively automatic process. Thus, to read other species’ facial emotions successfully, individuals must overcome these automatic perceptual processes and employ learning strategies to appreciate the inter-species emotional repertoire. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s10071-020-01348-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-71815612020-04-29 Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans Correia-Caeiro, Catia Guo, Kun Mills, Daniel S. Anim Cogn Original Paper Facial expressions are a core component of the emotional response of social mammals. In contrast to Darwin's original proposition, expressive facial cues of emotion appear to have evolved to be species-specific. Faces trigger an automatic perceptual process, and so, inter-specific emotion perception is potentially a challenge; since observers should not try to “read” heterospecific facial expressions in the same way that they do conspecific ones. Using dynamic spontaneous facial expression stimuli, we report the first inter-species eye-tracking study on fully unrestrained participants and without pre-experiment training to maintain attention to stimuli, to compare how two different species living in the same ecological niche, humans and dogs, perceive each other’s facial expressions of emotion. Humans and dogs showed different gaze distributions when viewing the same facial expressions of either humans or dogs. Humans modulated their gaze depending on the area of interest (AOI) being examined, emotion, and species observed, but dogs modulated their gaze depending on AOI only. We also analysed if the gaze distribution was random across AOIs in both species: in humans, eye movements were not correlated with the diagnostic facial movements occurring in the emotional expression, and in dogs, there was only a partial relationship. This suggests that the scanning of facial expressions is a relatively automatic process. Thus, to read other species’ facial emotions successfully, individuals must overcome these automatic perceptual processes and employ learning strategies to appreciate the inter-species emotional repertoire. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s10071-020-01348-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2020-02-12 2020 /pmc/articles/PMC7181561/ /pubmed/32052285 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01348-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Original Paper
Correia-Caeiro, Catia
Guo, Kun
Mills, Daniel S.
Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans
title Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans
title_full Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans
title_fullStr Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans
title_full_unstemmed Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans
title_short Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans
title_sort perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans
topic Original Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7181561/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32052285
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01348-5
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