Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.