Elsevier

Journal of Veterinary Behavior

Volume 9, Issue 4, July–August 2014, Pages 158-163
Journal of Veterinary Behavior

Research
Reciprocal attention of dogs and owners in urban contexts

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2014.04.004Get rights and content

Abstract

Laboratory-based studies have shown that paying attention to humans is an important determinant of dogs' behavior. However, there are no data on how gaze is deployed between dogs and owners in non-laboratory conditions. This study aimed at characterizing dogs' and owners' attention to each other in 2 urban contexts, characterized by a different density of dynamic stimuli. Short videos of 176 dog–owner couples walking in streets and squares of the city center (CC) or green areas (GAs) of the center of Padova (Italy) were recorded. Continuous sampling was used for recording when dogs and owners were visually oriented toward their respective partners. These data allowed calculation of the average length of continuous gazes, number of gazes per minute, and the percentage of time in which dogs and owners were oriented toward their partners; also computed were the frequency and duration of mutual gazes. Eighty-three dogs and 32 owners never looked at their reciprocal partners for the entire duration of the video. On average, dogs were oriented to owners for 0.6% of the time and looked at them 0.5 times per minute, in bouts of 0.5 seconds. All parameters of dogs' attention were higher for off-leash dogs in GAs than for on-leash dogs in both GAs and CC. Although such limited attention to owners may reflect the requirements of ongoing action, it also suggests that most dogs do not need to look at their owners during walks, possibly because they are not confronted with situations of uncertainty. Owners were oriented to their dogs for 5.3% of the time and looked at them 1.7 times per minute, in bouts of 1.4 seconds. Owners' attention was lower in CC than in GAs, which may reflect differences between contexts in the number of distracting stimuli or in owners' motivations for looking at their dogs while walking in these different contexts.

Introduction

Paying attention to other group members is an essential feature in the social life of a species. Dogs are distinctive in this regard as living in human societies may require them to direct attention toward heterospecific companions. Indeed, dogs' propensity to look at humans seems so embedded in the species that it was proposed as a distinguishing feature between dogs and wolves (Miklósi et al., 2003). Dogs' ability to exploit visual information from humans takes many forms: dogs are predisposed to follow overt human communicative gestures to locate resources (Hare and Tomasello, 2005, Virányi et al., 2008) and to refine this ability through experience (Udell et al., 2010). Witnessing human demonstrators influences dogs' performance in detour (Pongrácz et al., 2001) and manipulative tasks (Miller et al., 2009) and, with appropriate training, dogs can learn to imitate some human motor patterns (Topál et al., 2006, Fugazza and Miklósi, 2014). Dogs can also determine humans' attentional states by looking at them and can modify their behavior accordingly: they prefer to obey and beg from attentive rather than nonattentive humans (Gácsi et al., 2004, Virányi et al., 2004) and can take advantage of inattention, for instance by eating forbidden pieces of food when the forbidding human appears not to be looking at them (Call et al., 2003, Schwab and Huber, 2006).

The mentioned studies offer substantial evidence that dogs resort to looking at humans in a variety of situations. Nonetheless, dogs will not pay the same level of attention to any person in a given context. A few studies have been focusing on the role of the identity of the human partner on the distribution of gazes, showing, for instance that the dogs' owner involved in a manipulation task will receive higher attention than an unfamiliar person performing the same activity (Range et al., 2009). Another manipulation situation used by Horn et al. (2013) indicated that such increase in attention levels requires a close relationship, rather than mere familiarity. The owner's capacity to elicit particularly high levels of attention by dogs becomes especially evident if the animal is presented simultaneously with 2 human “targets,” a condition in which dogs will look at their owner with much longer gazes than at a stranger (Mongillo et al., 2010).

The studies cited so far have all been conducted in strictly controlled experimental conditions. However, a possible limitation of these laboratory-based studies is that they may not adequately model how attention is deployed between dogs and owners in more natural circumstances, for a laboratory can hardly incorporate the quantity and types of stimuli to which dogs are likely to be exposed in real life. Although there are a few studies that focused on dogs' social interactions in natural contexts (Bekoff and Meaney, 1997, Westgarth et al., 2010, Řezáč et al., 2011), there are no data on dog–human attention in such contexts.

This study aimed at providing a characterization of attention between dogs and owners in non-laboratory conditions; to this aim, we chose to run the study in urban areas, which allowed us to observe a great number of dogs and owners engaging in spontaneous behavior, which would have been harder to obtain otherwise, for example, by recording in owners' private properties. The urban environment also provides well-characterizable contexts, varying in the type and density of stimuli, which gave us the opportunity to assess, as a further aim of the study, how dogs' and owners' attention is deployed in the presence of a great number and type of stimuli as opposed to a relatively less rich context.

Section snippets

Subjects and procedure

The present study was carried out in the city of Padova (Italy). Short videos were taken of 176 dog–owner couples walking in various areas of the city. In detail, 2 types of contexts were chosen: (1) the streets and squares of the old city center (CC), characterized by a relatively high density of people and of objects in motion (e.g., bicycles, baby carriages, wheelchairs; Figure 1) (median N of stimuli/video frame = 11; minimum = 5, maximum = 22), as well as by sounds and noises, and (2) the

Sample characteristics

The overall sample included 86 small dogs (height at shoulder below 30 cm; CC: 48; GAs: 38), 44 medium-sized dogs (height between 30 and 60 cm; CC: 22; GAs: 22), and 46 large dogs (height above 60 cm; CC: 18; GAs: 28). With regard the breeds, the relative majority of dogs were of mixed breed (N = 65), followed by English cocker spaniel (N = 10) and Labrador retriever (N = 10). The frequency of breeds represented in the sample is listed in Table 1. There were 75 females (CC: 37; GAs: 38) and 101

Discussion

The first aim of this study was to characterize dogs' and owners' reciprocal attention in the course of a usual activity in a nonlaboratory context and, to this aim, we observed dog–owner couples walking in different urban environments. With regard to dogs, almost half of them were never oriented to their owners and when they did, both the frequency and duration of their gazes were generally very low. Consequently, low values were also found for the total duration of dogs' orientation to

Conclusions

In summary, this study provides the first characterization of dogs' and owners' reciprocal attention in a non-laboratory condition. Although it would be improper to compare directly our data with those obtained in laboratory-based studies, the gaze patterns that we observed by dogs and owners in urban contexts seem to be mainly functional to monitoring each other's presence/position, while they hardly allow extensive communication between dogs and owners. On the basis of our data, it is

Acknowledgments

We thank the owners who participated in the study, and Mrs. Gabriel Walton for her help in revising the English language. We are very grateful to the students Emmanuele Baro, Romina Brunetta, Francesca Pinali and Cecilia Filippi for helping with the experiments.

None of the authors of this article has any financial or personal relationship with other people or organizations that might inappropriately influence or bias its content. The idea for the article was conceived by Lieta Marinelli. The

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