Dogs can read where a person is headed from just a dozen moving dots
image:
Experimental setup and stimulus examples. Dogs viewed point-light displays of human and dog walkers, and videos of a human turning the head.
view moreCredit: Xiaohan Ma et al.
A person is nothing but 13 white dots walking on a dark screen — and most of us would still recognize a human figure and probably look the way it is going. A new study published in Cognitive Science Research shows dogs can do the same, but only when the dots represent a human, not another dog.
In the study, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences tested 28 working dogs with point-light displays of a person or a dog walking left, right, or forward, along with videos of a real person turning their head. The dogs were free to look wherever they liked while their reactions were video-recorded for later analysis.
When the dots depicted a human walking sideways, the dogs shifted their gaze in the same direction far more often than in the opposite direction. When the dots depicted another dog, however, the animals showed no such bias. And when the human figure walked straight toward the camera, the dogs simply kept watching the center — showing that the response reflected sensitivity to walking direction rather than movement alone.
“Dogs don't need explicit training to pick up directional social cues from human movement,” says senior and corresponding author Yi Jiang, a professor at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the study’s corresponding author. “That this response is selective: it appears for human walkers but not for dog walkers, even though both displays depicted biological motion.”
The dogs’ reaction to human point-light walkers was comparable to their reaction to human head turns — a well-known social cue. “In fact, for side-facing figures, the moving dots were slightly more effective than a head turn at drawing the dogs' gaze,” adds Jiang. “These findings suggest that dogs may use a common social-attention mechanism for different human directional social signals.”
The findings add to a growing picture of how domestication may have shaped dogs' social perception. “Although many species can perceive biological motion, evidence that animals can extract directional social cues from it remains scarce,” says co-author Xiqian Lu, who is also from the same institute. “To date, such evidence has come from monkeys and rats, which acquired this ability only after extensive training. Dogs, by contrast, responded spontaneously, and only to humans.”
The researchers noted that the dogs in the study were working dogs with daily human contact, so experience may also have contributed to their responses. “As to how much of this tuning reflects domestication and how much is shaped by individual experience is the next question,” adds Lu. “For now, nonetheless, the message is clear: a handful of moving dots is enough for dogs to tell where a person is going.”
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Contact author details: Yi Jiang, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China. Email: yijiang@psych.ac.cn
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Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Animals
Article Title
Spontaneous extraction of human social cues from biological motion in dogs.
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