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Browsing Neurociências by Author "Bacelar, Catarina Luísa Espanca"
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- Do dogs (canis familiaris) predict a conspecific´s next action based on its gaze?Publication . Bacelar, Catarina Luísa Espanca; Virányi, ZsófiaWhere someone is looking is one of the most reliable cue predicting her/his next action. Here we set out to investigate whether pet dogs predict which of two objects another dog is likely to approach based on its gaze direction. We used a violation-of-expectation paradigm, where the dogs’ looking time can tell if they created an expectation where another dog will look for food after they have seen it watching one of two food locations. Looking times were measured with an eye-tracker. In Experiment 1, subjects saw two kinds of video clips. In the congruent condition, the actor dog looked at one of two bowls and then ate from the same bowl. In the incongruent condition, the actor looked at one bowl, but then was visible eating from the other bowl. We found that subjects looked longer at actor eating in the first incongruent trial than in the first congruent trial whereas they tended to watch the bowl the actor was eating from longer in the congruent than in the incongruent trial. In Experiment 2, similar test trials were compared to control trials where the actor provided no gaze cue before eating from a bowl. Here we found no differences between test and control trials. Findings suggest that dogs can use gaze to predict a conspecific's next action and they may also recognize the referential content of gaze.