Dogs successfully follow human pointing gestures at a much younger age than their closest wild-living relative (i.e., wolf, Canis lupus), even when hand-reared. During the process of domestication, dogs have also been “worked” under various situation (for a review see ), so that they acquired the ability to discern social information from human body signals. described that dogs can discriminate between an owner and strangers based on isolated internal features of a human face (i.e., eyes, nose, or mouth), with configural information being highly important. For example, in an assessment of visual social cognition, Pitteri et al.
During their long history of domestication, dogs have developed a human-social skill (for a review see ).
These results indicate that dogs have an attentional style specialized for human non-verbal communication, with an emphasis placed on human hand gestures.ĭogs’ visual cognition has long been a popular research topic. Furthermore, gaze toward hands was greater in the human hand sign photos relative to photos where human hand signs were not present. Results revealed that subjects gazed at human limbs more than limbs within conspecific and cat images, where attention was predominately focused on the head and body. Digital color photographs were presented on a liquid crystal display monitor, and subject dogs viewed the images while their eyes were tracked. The present study investigated dogs’ gazing behaviors in three conditions: viewing humans with or without hand signs, viewing conspecifics, and viewing cats. Comparison among visual attentional patterns of dogs toward whole body of human being, conspecifics, and other species will reveal dogs’ basic social competences and those specialized to inter-species communication with humans. However, less is known regarding how dogs shift attention toward human body signals, specifically hand signs. These results indicate that dogs have an attentional style specialized for human non-verbal communication, with an emphasis placed on human hand gestures.ĭogs have developed a social competence tuned to communicate with human and acquire social information from body signals as well as facial expressions. The subjects gazed at human limns more frequently than limbs within conspecifics and cat images, where the dogs attention were focused on the head and body. The pictures showing humans with or without hand signs, dogs, and cats were presented on a liquid crystal display monitor, and gazing behaviors of subject dogs to these pictures were recorded by an eye-tracking device. The objective of this pilot study was to reveal dogs’ social visual attention tuned to inter-species communication with humans by comparing gazing patterns to the whole body of human, dogs, and cats. However, less is known regarding how dogs pay attention visually toward human body signals including hand signs. Dogs seem to communicate with humans successfully by getting social information from body signals such as hand signs.
0 kommentar(er)
