- Title Information
- Title
- Human-Dog Visual Interaction
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Pelgrim, Madeline H
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Buchsbaum, Daphna
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Advisor
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Malle, Bertram
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Sobel, David
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Tellex, Stefanie
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2026
- Physical Description
- Extent
- xix, 164 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note:
thesis
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2026
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- Dogs are a ubiquitous part of society. Dogs guide blind people, detect explosives, and search disaster zones for missing people. Despite our reliance on dogs for companionship and as working partners, we know little about how dogs visually perceive and engage with the world and their human companions. This dissertation aims to understand human-dog social interactions through a visual lens, challenging theories of human-unique cognition. I begin by capturing a baseline understanding of how dogs look at the world around them. I demonstrate that dogs' visual attention is not well modeled by a strictly bottom-up low-level visual saliency model, but that they actively direct their visual attention to different categories of items. I next focus on a unique social-communicative gesture, the point. I compare how dogs and toddlers perform on a complex point-following task, finding that toddlers outperform dogs, but that both species are challenged and perform well below ceiling levels. Toddlers' difficulty on this task challenges conventional wisdom about their approach to point following. I also demonstrate with an adult sample that the task is easily solvable. Next, I examine how humans and their dogs interact on an identical pointing task, quantifying how dog owners point for their own dogs, and how dogs physically approach the task. While dog owners' pointing gestures look, quantitatively, very different than those made by experimenters, dogs are equally successful at following the points. Finally, I explore how dog owners work with their dogs on an ecologically valid search task. I specifically test for a key marker of "human-unique" visual interactions, joint attention. Dogs and their owners are generally successful at locating the hidden item, effectively communicating the hiding location to each other. Owners and dogs engage in joint attention, and it promotes task success. This suggests that dogs may be able to form joint intentions with human partners, or at minimum that they display the visual behavioral signal classically attributed to joint attention.
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01909533")
- Topic
- Eye tracking
- Subject
- Topic
- visual studies
- Subject
- Topic
- Social cognition
- Subject
- Topic
- Comparative cognition
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00963479")
- Topic
- Human-animal communication
- Language
- Language Term (ISO639-2B)
- English
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20260516