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 attention within their environment. The present study, inspired by comparable work in infants, aimed to categorize the visual statistics (specifically the identity of objects) available to dogs during a common event in their daily lives, a walk. Using a head-mounted eye-tracking apparatus that was custom designed for dogs, four dogs walked on a pre-determined route outdoors under naturalistic conditions generating a total of 49,431 frames for analysis. On average, there were few individual differences between dogs. Dogs looked proportionally more to people and plants than to other object categories in their environment, like the sky which they appeared to consider as background. 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.

Past work has found that dogs perceive and respond to certain characteristics of items, specifically an object's familiarity and quality when making choices. However, in the real world, these characteristics don't exist in isolation, and understanding the interaction between familiarity and valuation as they relate to object choice can provide insight into how dogs make decisions. We aimed to explore how item familiarity and quality intersect to form dogs’ preferences for one food over another in a two-alternative forced choice task. We found that dogs' choices were driven only by the quality of the food item, and the familiarity of the item did not impact choice behavior. Determining what motivates dogs and contributes to their preferences has implications for understanding decision-making at large, as well as for advancing canine science.

Dogs are recognized for their social reasoning and skillful interactions with humans, but their understanding of causal rela-tionships and the underlying principles (e.g., temporal priority) are under-explored. To address this gap, we adapted a taskused with children to investigate how pet dogs use temporal sequences of events. Dogs (N=22) watched an experimenterperform a sequence of two actions on a puzzle box: i) one action before a treat was dispensed from the box (causal action)and ii) the other action after the treat appeared (non-causal action). Each action was temporally equidistant from the treat.After observing the sequence, dogs interacted with the box. Preliminary results indicate that over the course of five trialsdogs preferred interacting with the causal action and were more likely to investigate it first, compared to the non-causalaction on trial one. Results will be discussed in a comparative context of observational and experiential learning.

Pointing is an intuitive and commonplace communication modality. In human-robot collaborative tasks, human pointing has been modeled using a variety of approaches, such as the forearm vector or the vector from eye to hand. However, models of the human pointing vector have not been uniformly or comprehensively evaluated. We performed a user study to compare five different representations of the pointing vector and their accuracies in identifying the human's intended target in an object selection task. We also compare the vectors' performances to that of domestic dogs to assess a non-human baseline known to be successful at following human points. Additionally, we developed an observation model to transform the vector into a probability map for object search. We implemented our system on our robot, enabling it to locate and fetch the user's desired objects efficiently and accurately.

Domestic dogs excel at understanding human social-communicative gestures. The present study explores whether dogscan use peoples past accuracy when deciding who to trust. In Experiment 1, dogs watched an informant hide a treat underone of two containers and then point at one of them. Dogs were more likely to follow an accurate (pointed correctly)vs. the inaccurate (pointed incorrectly) informants point. In Experiment 2, dogs interacted separately with an accurateand inaccurate informant and again were more likely to follow an accurate point. In test trials, dogs did not witnesshiding of the treat and saw the same two informants simultaneously point at different locations. Here, they chose betweenthe locations at chance-level. Dogs inability to selectively follow a previously accurate informant when presented withconflicting information suggests that, unlike children, they may not be able to use past informant accuracy when choosingwhose information to use.