Dogs Rely On Visual Cues Rather Than On Effector-Specific Movement Representations to Predict Human Action Targets.

ABSTRACT: The ability to predict others' actions is one of the main pillars of social cognition. We investigated the processes underlying this ability by pitting motor representations of the observed movements against visual familiarity. In two pre-registered eye-tracking experiments, we measured the gaze arrival times of 16 dogs (Canis familiaris) who observed videos of a human or a conspecific executing the same goal-directed actions. On the first trial, when the human agent performed human-typical movements outside dogs' specific motor repertoire, dogs' gaze arrived at the target object anticipatorily (i.e., before the human touched the target object). When the agent was a conspecific, dogs' gaze arrived to the target object reactively (i.e., upon or after touch). When the human agent perf

SUBMITTER: Lonardo L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10575556 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature