Novel approach to study the perception of animacy in dogs

Abstract

Humans tend to perceive inanimate objects as animate based on simple motion cues. So far this perceptual bias has been studied mostly in humans by utilizing two-dimensional video and interactive displays. Considering its importance for survival, the perception of animacy is probably also widespread among animals, however two-dimensional displays are not necessarily the best approach to study the phenomenon in non-human species. Here we applied a novel method to study whether dogs recognize a dependent (chasing-like) movement pattern performed by inanimate agents in live demonstration. We found that dogs showed more interest toward the agents that demonstrated the chasing-like motion, compared to those that were involved in the independent movement. We suggest that dogs spontaneously recognized the chasing-like pattern and thus they may have considered the interacting partners as animate agents. This methodological approach may be useful to test perceptual animacy in other non-human species.