Dog eye movements are slower than human eye movements

Abstract

Eye movement of a species reflects the visual behavior strategy that it has adapted to during its evolution. What are eye movements of domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) like? Investigations of dog eye movements per se have not been done, despite the increasing number of visuo-cognitive studies in dogs using eye-tracking systems. To fill this gap, we have recorded dog eye movements using a video-based eye-tracking system, and compared the dog data to that of humans. We found dog saccades follow the systematic relationships between saccade metrics previously shown in humans and other animal species. Yet, the details of the relationships, and the quantities of each metric of dog saccades and fixations differed from those of humans. Overall, dog saccades were slower and fixations were longer than those of humans. We hope our findings contribute to existing comparative analyses of eye movement across animal species, and also to improvement of algorithms used for classifying eye movement data of dogs.