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.