Part-based and configural processing of owner's face in dogs.

ABSTRACT: Dogs exhibit characteristic looking patterns when looking at human faces but little is known about what the underlying cognitive mechanisms are and how much these are influenced by individual experience. In Experiment 1, seven dogs were trained in a simultaneous discrimination procedure to assess whether they could discriminate a) the owner's face parts (eyes, nose or mouth) presented in isolation and b) whole faces where the same parts were covered. Dogs discriminated all the three parts of the owner's face presented in isolation, but needed fewer sessions to reach the learning criterion for the eyes than for both nose and mouth. Moreover, covering the eyes region significantly disrupted face discriminability compared to the whole face condition while such difference was not found when th

SUBMITTER: Pitteri E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4177116 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature