Pongrácz Péter, Péter András, Miklósi Ádám
1 Department of Ethology, Biological Institute, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
2 MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 Jun;71(6):1457-1468. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2017.1333623. Epub 2018 Jan 1.
A central problem of behavioural studies providing artificial visual stimuli for non-human animals is to determine how subjects perceive and process these stimuli. Especially in the case of videos, it is important to ascertain that animals perceive the actual content of the images and are not just reacting to the motion cues in the presentation. In this study, we set out to investigate how dogs process life-sized videos. We aimed to find out whether dogs perceive the actual content of video images or whether they only react to the videos as a set of dynamic visual elements. For this purpose, dogs were presented with an object search task where a life-sized projected human was hiding a target object. The videos were either normally oriented or displayed upside down, and we analysed dogs' reactions towards the projector screen after the video presentations, and their performance in the search task. Results indicated that in the case of the normally oriented videos, dogs spontaneously perceived the actual content of the images. However, the 'Inverted' videos were first processed as a set of unrelated visual elements, and only after some exposure to these videos did the dogs show signs of perceiving the unusual configuration of the depicted scene. Our most important conclusion was that dogs process the same type of artificial visual stimuli in different ways, depending on the familiarity of the depicted scene, and that the processing mode can change with exposure to unfamiliar stimuli.
为非人类动物提供人工视觉刺激的行为研究的一个核心问题是确定实验对象如何感知和处理这些刺激。特别是在视频的情况下，重要的是要确定动物是否感知到图像的实际内容，而不仅仅是对呈现中的运动线索做出反应。在这项研究中，我们着手研究狗如何处理真人大小的视频。我们旨在弄清楚狗是感知视频图像的实际内容，还是仅仅将视频作为一组动态视觉元素做出反应。为此，我们给狗布置了一个物体搜索任务，在任务中一个真人大小的投影人像隐藏了一个目标物体。视频要么是正常方向播放，要么是倒着播放，我们分析了视频播放后狗对投影屏幕的反应以及它们在搜索任务中的表现。结果表明，对于正常方向播放的视频，狗能自发地感知图像的实际内容。然而，“倒置”的视频首先被当作一组不相关的视觉元素进行处理，只有在接触这些视频一段时间后，狗才表现出感知到所描绘场景异常构图的迹象。我们最重要的结论是，狗根据所描绘场景的熟悉程度，以不同方式处理同类型的人工视觉刺激，并且处理模式会随着接触不熟悉的刺激而改变。
