Infants and dogs´ perception of causality and animacy

This project is trying to figure out if dogs and 6-16-month-old human infants have the same expectations about physics. Humans and dogs both evolved in a world that obeys Newtonian physical laws: Objects only move when something causes them to move. That something can be a collision with another object, or in the case of living things, some kind of internal force. In fact, one of the ways humans and dogs might detect whether something is alive is by whether it moves in a way that physics only allows if the object can move on its own. In this project, we are testing whether dogs and infants pay more attention to or are surprised by events where objects move in a way that is impossible based on collisions alone, which might indicate the objects can move on their own. We are also looking at whether infants and dogs expect objects that move on their own to have goals and intentions, whether they choose to approach or avoid these objects, and how humans and dogs might differ in their understanding of these events despite evolving in the same kind of Newtonian world. To do this, we are using eye-trackers with both infants and dogs so we can measure both where they look and pupil dilation, since both species pupils dilate when they are surprised or excited.

No additional funding sources recorded.