Dogs' looking times and pupil dilation response reveal expectations about contact causality

Abstract

Contact causality is one of the fundamental principles allowing us to make sense of our physical environment. From an early age, humans perceive spatio-temporally contiguous launching events as causal. Surprisingly little is known about causal perception in non-human animals, particularly outside the primate order. Violation-of-expectation paradigms in combination with eye-tracking and pupillometry have been used to study physical expectations in human infants. In the current study, we establish this approach for dogs ( Canis familiaris ). We presented dogs with realistic three-dimensional animations of launching events with contact (regular launching event) or without contact between the involved objects. In both conditions, the objects moved with the same timing and kinematic properties. The dogs tracked the object movements closely throughout the study but their pupils were larger in the no-contact condition and they looked longer at the object initiating the launch after the no-contact event compared to the contact event. We conclude that dogs have implicit expectations about contact causality.