Dogs' ability to follow temporarily invisible moving objects: the ability to track and expect is shaped by experience.

Visually tracking a moving object, even if it becomes temporarily invisible, is an important skill for animals living in complex environments. However, this ability has not been widely explored in dogs. To address this gap of knowledge and understand how experience contributes to such ability, we conducted two experiments using a violation of expectation paradigm.

The effect of experience and of dots' density and duration on the detection of coherent motion in dogs.

Knowledge about the mechanisms underlying canine vision is far from being exhaustive, especially that concerning post-retinal elaboration. One aspect that has received little attention is motion perception, and in spite of the common belief that dogs are extremely apt at detecting moving stimuli, there is no scientific support for such an assumption. In fact, we recently showed that dogs have higher thresholds than humans for coherent motion detection (Kanizsar et al.

The Way Dogs () Look at Human Emotional Faces Is Modulated by Oxytocin. An Eye-Tracking Study.

Dogs have been shown to excel in reading human social cues, including facial cues. In the present study we used eye-tracking technology to further study dogs' face processing abilities. It was found that dogs discriminated between human facial regions in their spontaneous viewing pattern and looked most to the eye region independently of facial expression.

Dogs are not better than humans at detecting coherent motion.

The ability to perceive motion is one of the main properties of the visual system. Sensitivity in detecting coherent motion has been thoroughly investigated in humans, where thresholds for motion detection are well below 10% of coherence, i.e.

The effect of oxytocin on biological motion perception in dogs (Canis familiaris).

Recent studies have shown that the neuropeptide oxytocin is involved in the regulation of several complex human social behaviours. There is, however, little research on the effect of oxytocin on basic mechanisms underlying human sociality, such as the perception of biological motion. In the present study, we investigated the effect of oxytocin on biological motion perception in dogs (Canis familiaris), a species adapted to the human social environment and thus widely used to model many aspects of human social behaviour.

Intranasally administered oxytocin affects how dogs (Canis familiaris) react to the threatening approach of their owner and an unfamiliar experimenter.

Fear and aggression are among the most prominent behavioural problems in dogs. Oxytocin has been shown to play a role in regulating social behaviours in humans including fear and aggression. As intranasal oxytocin has been found to have some analogous effects in dogs and humans, here we investigated the effect of oxytocin on dogs' behaviour in the Threatening Approach Test.

Oxytocin induces positive expectations about ambivalent stimuli (cognitive bias) in dogs.

Expectancy bias towards positive outcomes is a potential key to subjective well-being, and has been widely investigated in different species. Here we test whether oxytocin, suggested to play a role in human optimism and emotional processing, influences how dogs judge ambivalent situations (in a cognitive bias paradigm). Subjects first learned in a location discrimination task that a bowl either contained food (at the 'positive' location) or was empty (at the 'negative' location).