Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Dogs live in an environment built around humans dominant sense of sight. Despite millenia of co-habitation, little isknown about how dogs visually evaluate objects when making perceptual decisions, and whether they do this in a human-like manner. To explore this question, we analyzed visual attention patterns of pet dogs (N=39) in a 2-object choicetask. Two foods of unequal reward value (hotdogs and dried corn) were presented over ten trials in four experimentalconditions: i) in open palms; ii) on plates; iii) in cups; and iv) in filled jars. Dogs chose one food item per trial. We codedvisual attention measures of total looking time at each item and frequency of looks to each item from video and comparedthem with dogs subsequent item choice strategies. We discuss gazing and choice behaviour in a comparative context ofperceptual decision making.