Abstract
Preferential attention to living creatures is believed to be an intrinsic capacity of the visual system of several species, with perception of biological motion often studied and, in humans, it correlates with social cognitive performance. Although domestic dogs are exceptionally attentive to human social cues, it is unknown whether their sociability is associated with sensitivity to conspecific and heterospecific biological motion cues of different social relevance. We recorded video clips of point-light displays depicting a human or dog walking in either frontal or lateral view. In a preferential looking paradigm, dogs spontaneously viewed 16 paired point-light displays showing combinations of normal/inverted (control condition), human/dog and frontal/lateral views. Overall, dogs looked significantly longer at frontal human point-light display versus the inverted control, probably due to its clearer social/biological relevance. Dogs’ sociability, assessed through owner-completed questionnaires, further revealed that low-sociability dogs preferred the lateral point-light display view, whereas high-sociability dogs preferred the frontal view. Clearly, dogs can recognize biological motion, but their preference is influenced by their sociability and the stimulus salience, implying biological motion perception may reflect aspects of dogs’ social cognition.
Highlights
Biological motion, often created by point-light displays in which a few dots representing major joints of an otherwise invisible human/animal figure in action, can reveal characteristic motion patterns and enable naïve observers to infer an actor’s action, gender, identity, intention and emotional states (Blake and Shiffrar 2007; Pavlova 2012)
With a preferential looking paradigm, this is the first study to demonstrate in non-human animals a relevant sociability-modulated preference for biological motion of different species and viewing perspectives
Less sociable dogs preferred biological motion in a lateral view, whereas more sociable dogs preferred the frontal view, implying biological motion perception could potentially be a hallmark of social cognition and preferences in non-human social animals
Summary
Biological motion, often created by point-light displays in which a few dots representing major joints of an otherwise invisible human/animal figure in action, can reveal characteristic motion patterns and enable naïve observers to infer an actor’s action (e.g. walking, dancing), gender, identity, intention and emotional states (Blake and Shiffrar 2007; Pavlova 2012). Sensitivity to conspecific and heterospecific biological motion has been reported in many non-human species, such as chimpanzees (Tomonaga 2001), baboons (Parron et al 2007), rhesus monkeys (Vangeneugden et al 2010), common marmosets (Brown et al 2010), dogs (Kovács et al 2016), cats (Blake 1993), rats (MacKinnon et al 2010) and chickens (Regolin et al 2000). A review of the literature shows that after training chimpanzees, baboons and cats were capable of discriminating a point-light display portraying a quadrupedal walking conspecifics in lateral view from a control motion pattern (Blake 1993; Tomonaga 2001; Parron et al 2007), whereas rhesus monkeys and rats could categorize human walking directions (MacKinnon et al 2010; Vangeneugden et al 2010).
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