Categorizing the Visual Environment and Analyzing the Visual Attention of Dogs

Dogs have a unique evolutionary relationship with humans and serve many important roles e.g. search and rescue, blind assistance, emotional support. However, few datasets exist to categorize visual features and objects available to dogs, as well as how dogs direct their visual attention within their environment. We collect and study a dataset with over 11,698 gazes to categorize the objects available to be gazed at by 11 dogs in everyday outdoor environments i.e. a walk around a college campus and urban area. We explore the availability of these object categories and the visual attention of dogs over these categories using a head mounted eye tracking apparatus. A small portion (approx. 600 images or < 20% of total dataset) of the collected data is used to fine tune a MaskRCNN for the novel image domain to segment objects present in the scene, enabling further statistical analysis on the visual gaze tendencies of dogs. The MaskRCNN, with eye tracking apparatus, serves as an end to end model for automatically classifying the visual fixations of dogs. The fine tuned MaskRCNN performs far better than chance. There are few individual differences between the 11 dogs and we observe greater visual fixations on buses, plants, pavement, and construction equipment. This work takes a step towards understanding visual behavior of dogs and their interaction with the physical world.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, 1 table, WACV CV4Smalls Worksho

ManyDogs Project: A Big Team Science Approach to Investigating Canine Behavior and Cognition

Dogs have a special place in human history as the first domesticated species and play important roles in many cultures around the world. However, their role in scientific studies has been relatively recent. With a few notable exceptions (e.g., Darwin, Pavlov, Scott, and Fuller), domestic dogs were not commonly the subject of rigorous scientific investigation of behavior until the late 1990s. Although the number of canine science studies has increased dramatically over the last 20 years, most research groups are limited in the inferences they can draw because of the relatively small sample sizes used, along with the exceptional diversity observed in dogs (e.g., breed, geographic location, experience). To this end, we introduce the ManyDogs Project, an international consortium of researchers interested in taking a big team science approach to understanding canine behavioral science. We begin by discussing why studying dogs provides valuable insights into behavior and cognition, evolutionary processes, human health, and applications for animal welfare. We then highlight other big team science projects that have previously been conducted in canine science and emphasize the benefits of our approach. Finally, we introduce the ManyDogs Project and our mission: (a) replicating important findings, (b) investigating moderators that need a large sample size such as breed differences, (c) reaching methodological consensus, (d) investigating cross-cultural differences, and (e) setting a standard for replication studies in general. In doing so, we hope to address previous limitations in individual lab studies and previous big team science frameworks to deepen our understanding of canine behavior and cognition

Head-Mounted Mobile Eye-Tracking in the Domestic Dog: A New Method

Humans rely on dogs for countless tasks, ranging from companionship to highly specialized detection work. In their daily lives, dogs must navigate a human-built visual world, yet comparatively little is known about what dogs visually attend to as they move through their environment. Real-world eye-tracking, or head-mounted eye-tracking, allows participants to freely move through their environment, providing more naturalistic results about visual attention while interacting with objects and agents. In dogs, real-world eye-tracking has the potential to inform our understanding of cross-species cognitive abilities as well as working dog training, however a robust and easily deployed head-mounted eye-tracking method for dogs has not previously been developed and tested. We present a novel method for real-world eye-tracking in dogs, using a simple head-mounted mobile apparatus mounted onto goggles designed for dogs. This new method, adapted from systems that are widely used in humans, allows for eye-tracking during more naturalistic behaviors, namely walking around and interacting with real-world stimuli, as well as reduced training time as compared to traditional stationary eye-tracking methods. We found that while completing a simple forced-choice treat-finding task, dogs look primarily to the treat, and we demonstrated the accuracy of this method using alternative gaze-tracking methods. Additionally, eye-tracking revealed more fine-grained time course information and individual differences in looking patterns

Categorizing Dog’s Real World Visual Environment

Dogs have a unique evolutionary relationship with humans and are relied upon in a variety of working roles, yet little is known about the kinds of visual information available to them, as well as how they direct their visual attention within their environment. The present study, inspired by comparable work in infants, aimed to categorize the items available to be gazed at by dogs during a common event in their daily life, a walk. We then explored the statistics over the availability of those categories and over the dogs’ visual attention. Using a head-mounted eye-tracking apparatus that was custom designed for dogs, 11 dogs walked on a pre-determined route outdoors under naturalistic conditions generating a total of 11,698 gazes for analysis. Image stills from these fixations were then analyzed using computer vision techniques to explore the items present, and how much space within the visual field those items occupied, and which of the items the dog was gazing at. On average, there were few individual differences between dogs both in the items in dogs’ field of view and their gaze to items. Dogs looked proportionally most at people, buses, plants, the pavement, and construction equipment. The results of this project provide a foundational step towards understanding how dogs look at and interact with their physical world, opening up avenues for future research into how they complete tasks, and learn and make decisions, both independently and with a human social partner

Synchronous Citizen Science with Dogs

Citizen science approaches have grown in popularity over the years, partly due to their ability to reach a wider audience and produce more generalizable samples. In dogs, these studies, though, have been limited in their experimental controls. Over two studies, we explored and validated a synchronous citizen science approach. We had dog guardians act as experimenters while being supervised by a researcher over Zoom. In study 1, we demonstrated that synchronous citizen science is appropriate for trial-based research. We found, consistent with past work from in-lab research, that dogs are significantly better than chance at selecting a treat (vs. an empty plate) in a two-alternative forced-choice task. In study 2, we showed that Zoom studies are appropriate for looking-time studies. We explored dogs’ looking behaviors when a bag of treats was placed in an unreachable location and dogs’ guardians were either attentive or inattentive while dogs attempted to retrieve the treats. We found, consistent with past work, that dogs in the attentive condition looked at their owner for longer periods and had a shorter latency until the first look than dogs in the inattentive condition. Overall, we have demonstrated that synchronous citizen science studies with dogs are feasible and produce valid results consistent with those found in a typical lab setting

What's the point? Domestic dogs' sensitivity to the accuracy of human informants

Dogs excel at understanding human social-communicative gestures like points and can distinguish between human informants who vary in characteristics such as knowledge or familiarity. This study explores if dogs, like human children, can use human social informants’ past accuracy when deciding whom to trust. Experiment 1 tested whether dogs would behave differently in the presence of an accurate (vs. inaccurate) informant. Dogs followed an accurate informant’s point significantly above chance. Further, when presented with an inaccurate point, dogs were more likely to ignore it and choose the correct location. Experiment 2 tested whether dogs could use informant past accuracy to selectively follow the point of the previously accurate informant. In test trials when informants simultaneously pointed at different locations (only one of which contained a treat), dogs chose the accurate informant at chance levels. Experiment 3 controlled for non-social task demands (e.g. understanding of hidden baiting and occlusion events) that may have influenced Experiment 2 performance. In test trials, dogs chose to follow the accurate (vs. inaccurate) informant. This suggests that like children, dogs may be able to use informants’ past accuracy when choosing between information sources

What’s the Point? Domestic Dogs’ Sensitivity to the Accuracy of Human Informants

Dogs excel at understanding human social-communicative gestures like points and can distinguish between human informants who vary in characteristics such as knowledge or familiarity. This study explores if dogs, like human children, can use human social informants’ past accuracy when deciding whom to trust. Experiment 1 tested whether dogs would behave differently in the presence of an accurate (vs. inaccurate) informant. Dogs followed an accurate informant’s point significantly above chance. Further, when presented with an inaccurate point, dogs were more likely to ignore it and choose the correct location. Experiment 2 tested whether dogs could use informant past accuracy to selectively follow the point of the previously accurate informant. In test trials when informants simultaneously pointed at different locations (only one of which contained a treat), dogs chose the accurate informant at chance levels. Experiment 3 controlled for non-social task demands (e.g. understanding of hidden baiting and occlusion events) that may have influenced Experiment 2 performance. In test trials, dogs chose to follow the accurate (vs. inaccurate) informant. This suggests that like children, dogs may be able to use informants’ past accuracy when choosing between information sources

ManyDogs 1

Repository of ManyDogs pre-registrations and study supplementary materials

ManyDogs 1: A Multi-lab replication study of dogs' pointing comprehension (pre-registered report)

To promote collaboration across canine science, address reproducibility issues, and advance open science practices within animal cognition, we have launched the ManyDogs consortium, modeled on similar ManyX projects in other fields. We aimed to create a collaborative network that (a) uses large, diverse samples to investigate and replicate findings, (b) promotes open science practices of preregistering hypotheses, methods, and analysis plans, (c) investigates the influence of differences across populations and breeds, and (d) examines how different research methods and testing environments influence the robustness of results. Our first study combines a phenomenon that appears to be highly robust—dogs’ ability to follow human pointing—with a question that remains controversial: do dogs interpret pointing as a social communicative gesture or as a simple associative cue? We collected preliminary data (N = 61) from a single laboratory on two conditions of a 2-alternative object choice task: (1) Ostensive (experimenter pointed to a baited cup after making eye-contact and saying the dog’s name); (2) Non-ostensive (experimenter pointed to a baited cup without making eye-contact or saying the dog’s name). Dogs followed the ostensive point, but not the non-ostensive point, significantly more often than expected by chance. Preliminary results also provided suggestive evidence for variability in point-following across dog breeds. The next phase is the global participation stage of the project. We propose to replicate this protocol in a large and diverse sample of research sites, simultaneously assessing replicability between labs and further investigating the question of dogs’ point-following comprehension