Familiarity with images affects how dogs (Canis familiaris) process life-size video projections of humans

Abstract

A central problem of behavioural studies providing artificial visual stimuli for non-human animals is to determine how subjects perceive and process these stimuli. Especially in the case of videos, it is important to ascertain that animals perceive the actual content of the images and are not just reacting to the motion cues in the presentation. In this study, we set out to investigate how dogs process life-sized videos. We aimed to find out whether dogs perceive the actual content of video images or whether they only react to the videos as a set of dynamic visual elements. For this purpose, dogs were presented with an object search task where a life-sized projected human was hiding a target object. The videos were either normally oriented or displayed upside down, and we analysed dogs' reactions towards the projector screen after the video presentations, and their performance in the search task. Results indicated that in the case of the normally oriented videos, dogs spontaneously perceived the actual content of the images. However, the 'Inverted' videos were first processed as a set of unrelated visual elements, and only after some exposure to these videos did the dogs show signs of perceiving the unusual configuration of the depicted scene. Our most important conclusion was that dogs process the same type of artificial visual stimuli in different ways, depending on the familiarity of the depicted scene, and that the processing mode can change with exposure to unfamiliar stimuli.

Exploring the use of projected videos to test action matching from different perspectives in dogs

“…The results of the Frontal camera condition showed that both Tara and Franc matched familiar actions displayed on the screen above chance, indicating that the training was successful, at least to some extent, and dogs can match human actions when the owner's frontal view is projected in 2D, to some degree. The dogs' capacity to use 2D stimuli as samples against which to match their own behavior expands the findings of previous studies on dogs' imitative skills (e.g., Topál et al 2006) and is in line with dogs' capacity to rely on 2D stimuli in an object search and object choice tasks (Pongrácz et al 2018;Péter et al 2013).…”

“…Imitative skills can be used to test several cognitive abilities that would be otherwise elusive in non-human species, such as mapping others' body parts into one's own, representation of others' goals, and different forms of memory (e.g., Fugazza et al 2016Fugazza et al , 2019. Video projected stimuli are widely used in cognitive studies, not only with human subjects but also with non-human animals (e.g., Myowa-Yamakoshi et al 2012), and their use is increasing also in cognitive research with dogs (e.g., Pongrácz et al 2018). The main advantage of the use of 2D stimuli is that they can be experimentally manipulated to expose the subjects to conditions that would otherwise be difficult to present or systematically modify.…”

“…Dogs were shown to be able to use pre-recorded videos as a source of information (Péter et al 2013) but familiarity with the depicted scene affected the way they process it (Pongrácz et al 2018). Infants are known to also imitate televised models (e.g., Seehagen & Herbert 2011;Sommer et al 2021) although there is a decrease in their imitative performance compared to live models (e.g., Barr and Hayne 1999;Barr 2010).…”

Behavioural Analysis of Dogs’ Response to Threatening and Neutral Conspecific Video Stimuli

“…Video stimuli have been successfully used in domestic dog cognition research, for example, showing that dogs performed at above chance level in a classic pointing task when a projection of an experimenter performing the pointing gestures was used, thus implying that dogs could perceive the actual content of the videos as a human being [29]. Evidence suggests that dogs process the videos in a "confusion mode", exchanging the image and its referent and thus reacting roughly the same way to an image as to the real object [30]. Finally, in an expectancy violation paradigm in which dogs were presented with videos of conspecifics and heterospecifics paired with coherent and incoherent auditory stimuli, dogs seemed to recognise (looking more at the non-matching stimuli) the visual (video) and auditory stimuli as belonging to a conspecific compared to another species [31].…”

Exploring the advantages of using artificial agents to investigate animacy perception in cats and dogs

“…Applying videos instead of a live demonstration has the advantage of being highly controlled, invariable (e.g. [17]) and in the case of animacy perception, it allows researchers to test how the specific cue in itself, without any disturbing factors, influences perception. However, it may not be the best approach in nonhuman species in general because projected images and videos are far from their natural set of visual inputs (for reviews about the use of video playbacks in studying animal behaviour, see [18,19]).…”