Evaluating Dogs’ Real-World Visual Environment and Attention

Abstract

Dogs have a unique evolutionary relationship with humans, yet little is known about the visual information available to them or how they direct their visual attention within their environment. The present study, inspired by comparable work in infants, classified the items available to be gazed at by dogs during a common daily event, a walk. We then explored the statistics over the availability of those categories and over the dogs’ visual attention. Using a head-mounted eye-tracking apparatus that was custom-designed for dogs, 11 dogs walked on a predetermined route outdoors under naturalistic conditions generating a total of 11,698 gazes for analysis. Image stills from these fixations were analyzed using computer vision techniques to explore the items present, the space within the visual field those items occupied, and which of the items the dog was gazing at. On average, dogs looked proportionally most at buses, plants, people, the pavement, and construction equipment; however, there were significant individual differences. The results of this project provide a foundational step toward understanding how dogs look at and interact with their physical world, opening up avenues for future research into how they learn and make decisions, both independently and with a human social partner.