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Dogs accurately track a moving object on a screen and anticipate its destination

The prediction of upcoming events is of importance not only to humans and non-human primates but also to other animals that live in complex environments with lurking threats or moving prey. In this study, we examined motion tracking and anticipatory looking in dogs in two eye-tracking experiments. I...

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Autores principales: Völter, Christoph J., Karl, Sabrina, Huber, Ludwig
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7670446/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33199751
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-72506-5
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author Völter, Christoph J.
Karl, Sabrina
Huber, Ludwig
author_facet Völter, Christoph J.
Karl, Sabrina
Huber, Ludwig
author_sort Völter, Christoph J.
collection PubMed
description The prediction of upcoming events is of importance not only to humans and non-human primates but also to other animals that live in complex environments with lurking threats or moving prey. In this study, we examined motion tracking and anticipatory looking in dogs in two eye-tracking experiments. In Experiment 1, we presented pet dogs (N = 14) with a video depicting how two players threw a Frisbee back and forth multiple times. The horizontal movement of the Frisbee explained a substantial amount of variance of the dogs’ horizontal eye movements. With increasing duration of the video, the dogs looked at the catcher before the Frisbee arrived. In Experiment 2, we showed the dogs (N = 12) the same video recording. This time, however, we froze and rewound parts of the video to examine how the dogs would react to surprising events (i.e., the Frisbee hovering in midair and reversing its direction). The Frisbee again captured the dogs’ attention, particularly when the video was frozen and rewound for the first time. Additionally, the dogs looked faster at the catcher when the video moved forward compared to when it was rewound. We conclude that motion tracking and anticipatory looking paradigms provide promising tools for future cognitive research with canids.
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spelling pubmed-76704462020-11-18 Dogs accurately track a moving object on a screen and anticipate its destination Völter, Christoph J. Karl, Sabrina Huber, Ludwig Sci Rep Article The prediction of upcoming events is of importance not only to humans and non-human primates but also to other animals that live in complex environments with lurking threats or moving prey. In this study, we examined motion tracking and anticipatory looking in dogs in two eye-tracking experiments. In Experiment 1, we presented pet dogs (N = 14) with a video depicting how two players threw a Frisbee back and forth multiple times. The horizontal movement of the Frisbee explained a substantial amount of variance of the dogs’ horizontal eye movements. With increasing duration of the video, the dogs looked at the catcher before the Frisbee arrived. In Experiment 2, we showed the dogs (N = 12) the same video recording. This time, however, we froze and rewound parts of the video to examine how the dogs would react to surprising events (i.e., the Frisbee hovering in midair and reversing its direction). The Frisbee again captured the dogs’ attention, particularly when the video was frozen and rewound for the first time. Additionally, the dogs looked faster at the catcher when the video moved forward compared to when it was rewound. We conclude that motion tracking and anticipatory looking paradigms provide promising tools for future cognitive research with canids. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-11-16 /pmc/articles/PMC7670446/ /pubmed/33199751 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-72506-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This 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 Article
Völter, Christoph J.
Karl, Sabrina
Huber, Ludwig
Dogs accurately track a moving object on a screen and anticipate its destination
title Dogs accurately track a moving object on a screen and anticipate its destination
title_full Dogs accurately track a moving object on a screen and anticipate its destination
title_fullStr Dogs accurately track a moving object on a screen and anticipate its destination
title_full_unstemmed Dogs accurately track a moving object on a screen and anticipate its destination
title_short Dogs accurately track a moving object on a screen and anticipate its destination
title_sort dogs accurately track a moving object on a screen and anticipate its destination
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7670446/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33199751
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-72506-5
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