Matching pictures with the appropriate sound: results from an eye-tracking study of dogs and 14-month-old infants Anna Gergely 1* A. Hernádi 2, E. Petró 1, B. Miklósi 1, Á. Miklósi 1, J. Topál 2 1 Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest 2 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Hung. Acad. Sci., Budapest

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) Promising candidate for modelling human social behaviour (Topál 2009) Communicative signs: pointing (eg. Miklósi et al 2000), gaze following (Téglás et al 2012) Domestication  selection

Eye-tracking with dogs 1999 (Dell’Osso et al): restrict dogs’ head movements 2010 (Mills et al): complex pre-training 2012 (Téglás et al): without any restriction, training

Cross-modal matching  Integration of information coming from several sensory modalities is crucial for communication and individual recognition in many species (Bovet & Deputte 2009)  Auditory-visual intermodal matching -Humans: communication, categorical discrimination

Aim & Questions 2. Do dogs and human infants show more attention and preference towards pictures of conspecifics? Simple picture-sound matching abilities: human & dog portraits bark & human voice 1. Do (a) dogs and (b) 14-months old infants show sound-image matching (gazing more at dog pic. the ‘barking’ condition and more at human portrait in the ‘human voice’ condition)?

Methods 1. Calibration Subjects 27 adult pet dogs, months old infants 2. Test trial

Data analysis Variables 1, Cumulative Accurancy: total looking time (milisecundum) in each AOI 2, First look: first registrated looking data in AOI, difference score: number of first look at one of the AOIs/ 2 Areas of interests (AOI) Congruent area Incongruent area Dog Human

Results – Dogs Cummulative accurancy Wilcoxon Matched pairs test Ns p>0.05 * p<0.05 N=27 Df=25 Looking time median ± SD (msec) ns * PreferenceMatching

Results – Dogs First look Wilcoxon Matched pairs test Ns p>0.05 * p<0.05 N=27 Df=25 Difference score * ns PreferenceMatching

Results – Infants Cummulative accurancy Paired t- test ** p<0.01 * p<0.05 N=17 Df=16 *** Looking time mean ± SE (msec) PreferenceMatching

Results – Infants First look * ns Difference score Wilcoxon Matched pairs test Ns p>0.05 * p<0.05 N=17 Df=15 PreferenceMatching

 Dogs show sophisticated ability to match auditory and visual stimuli ‘Matching ability’ Conclusions  Infants also showed some evidence of matching

Conclusions  Unlike dogs, infants showed a striking preference for dog image ‘Spontaneous preference’  novelty/attractivity effect; the ‘novelty value’ and/or the attractivity of an unfamiliar dog image may be higher than that of the unfamiliar human.

Thank you for your attention! This research is supported by SNFS Sinergia project “Swarmix” (CRSI )