ArticleScientific reports2017
Dogs are not better than humans at detecting coherent motion.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- On the (limited) use of touchscreen-based behavioural and cognitive research with dogs: potential causes and future directions.Animal cognition · 2026Pooled it
- Visual continuum in non-human animals: serial dependence revealed in dogs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Pictorial depth cues elicit the perception of tridimensionality in dogs.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Dogs' ability to follow temporarily invisible moving objects: the ability to track and expect is shaped by experience.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Are dogs good at spotting movement? Velocity thresholds of motion detection inCurrent zoology · 2020Article
- Dogs accurately track a moving object on a screen and anticipate its destination.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to perceive motion is one of the main properties of the visual system. Sensitivity in detecting coherent motion has been thoroughly investigated in humans, where thresholds for motion detection are well below 10% of coherence, i.e. of the proportion of dots coherently moving in the same direction, among a background of randomly moving dots. Equally low thresholds have been found in other species, including monkeys, cats and seals. Given the lack of data from the domestic dog, we tested 5 adult dogs on a conditioned discrimination task with random dot displays. In addition, five adult humans were tested in the same condition for comparative purposes. The mean threshold for motion detection in our dogs was 42% of coherence, while that of humans was as low as 5%. Therefore, dogs have a much higher threshold of coherent motion detection than humans, and possibly also than phylogenetically closer species that have been tested in similar experimental conditions. Various factors, including the relative role of global and local motion processing and experience with the experimental stimuli may have contributed to this result. Overall, this finding questions the general claim on dogs' high performance in detecting motion.
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Registered trials
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