You have probably seen videos of dogs reacting hysterically at other dogs on the television. But do they recognize as ‘dog’ the images on the screen?
Several earlier studies have looked at how dogs respond to 2-D stimuli. For example, a study published in 2006 looked at how dogs respond to a picture of either their owner’s or a stranger’s face on a monitor after they heard the voice of one of those persons. The face and voice matched in half of the trials – owner’s face + owner’s voice/strangers face + stranger’s voice and mismatched in the other half – owner’s face + strangers voice/stranger’s face + owner’s voice.
In the experiment, dogs looked longer at the picture when voice and visual were mismatched than the other way around, suggesting that they recognize both stimuli – voice and image as belonging to the same entity (owner), and so, are confused when they are mismatched. In a new study, researchers Paolo Mongillo et al. investigated whether dogs can recognize as dogs, videos of dogs on the screen, using a similar experiment.
Dogs were shown videos of either a dog or of an unfamiliar animal (cow or horse), paired with either the sound of a dog barking or of an unfamiliar vocalization (a frog croaking). The dogs used in the experiment had never seen cows, horses, or frogs. The animals entered the monitor from behind an opaque screen (entrance), walked across the monitor, and disappeared into another opaque screen (exit).
Researchers found that dogs spent less time oriented towards the monitor when bark was paired with a dog video (matched), than when any of such two stimuli were paired with an unfamiliar counterpart – a barking cow/horse or a croaking dog (mismatched). This suggests that dogs recognized the dog visuals and barks as belonging to members of their species and that they were surprised when a stimulus from a familiar entity (other dogs) is combined with stimuli from an unfamiliar entity.
Dogs, however, spent a longer time looking at the exit area when a dog was seen than when the unfamiliar species was seen, suggesting that they found dog videos especially interesting – “familiarity drives attention”.
“Dogs were more likely to visually follow the dogs’ video until it left the presentation area, than the unfamiliar species video.”
The findings of the study are further substantiated by a recent functional neuroimaging study which found greater activation of visual cortical areas in dogs, when shown videos of dog faces compared to human faces, suggesting the existence of special mechanisms to identify other dogs in the dog brain.
Read more about the study here.
