Lonardo Lucrezia, Völter Christoph J, Lamm Claus, Huber Ludwig
Comparative Cognition, Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine of Vienna, Medical University of Vienna and University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Unit, Department of Cognition, Emotion and Methods in Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Open Mind (Camb). 2023 Aug 20;7:588-607. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00096. eCollection 2023.
The ability to predict others' actions is one of the main pillars of social cognition. We investigated the processes underlying this ability by pitting motor representations of the observed movements against visual familiarity. In two pre-registered eye-tracking experiments, we measured the gaze arrival times of 16 dogs () who observed videos of a human or a conspecific executing the same goal-directed actions. On the first trial, when the human agent performed human-typical movements outside dogs' specific motor repertoire, dogs' gaze arrived at the target object anticipatorily (i.e., before the human touched the target object). When the agent was a conspecific, dogs' gaze arrived to the target object reactively (i.e., upon or after touch). When the human agent performed unusual movements more closely related to the dogs' motor possibilities (e.g., crawling instead of walking), dogs' gaze arrival times were intermediate between the other two conditions. In a replication experiment, with slightly different stimuli, dogs' looks to the target object were neither significantly predictive nor reactive, irrespective of the agent. However, when including looks at the target object that were not preceded by looks to the agents, on average dogs looked anticipatorily and sooner at the human agent's action target than at the conspecific's. Looking times and pupil size analyses suggest that the dogs' attention was captured more by the dog agent. These results suggest that visual familiarity with the observed action and saliency of the agent had a stronger influence on the dogs' looking behaviour than effector-specific movement representations in anticipating action targets.
预测他人行为的能力是社会认知的主要支柱之一。我们通过将观察到的动作的运动表征与视觉熟悉度进行对比，来研究这种能力背后的过程。在两项预先注册的眼动追踪实验中，我们测量了16只狗（）在观察人类或同种个体执行相同目标导向动作的视频时的注视到达时间。在第一次试验中，当人类执行者做出狗的特定运动技能之外的典型人类动作时，狗的注视会提前到达目标物体（即，在人类触碰目标物体之前）。当执行者是同种个体时，狗的注视会在触碰时或之后到达目标物体。当人类执行者做出与狗的运动可能性更相关的不寻常动作（例如，爬行而不是行走）时，狗的注视到达时间介于其他两种情况之间。在一项重复实验中，使用了略有不同的刺激，无论执行者是谁，狗看向目标物体的行为既没有显著的预测性也没有反应性。然而，当包括那些在看向执行者之前没有看向目标物体的情况时，平均而言，狗看向人类执行者动作目标的时间比看向同种个体的更早且更具预期性。注视时间和瞳孔大小分析表明，狗的注意力更多地被同种个体执行者吸引。这些结果表明，在预测动作目标时，对观察到的动作的视觉熟悉度和执行者的显著性对狗的注视行为的影响比效应器特定的运动表征更强。
