Perception of animacy leads to expectation of goal-directed behaviour in dogs

TL;DR

Dogs expect animate objects to act with goals, not just humans, suggesting they can anticipate goal-directed behavior based on perception of animacy.

Contribution

This study shows that dogs' expectation of goal-directed behavior is linked to perception of animacy, not just human-specific cues.

Findings

Dogs looked longer at the goal object when the actor moved in a route-consistent manner.

Dogs anticipated goal-directed behavior regardless of whether the actor was human or robot.

Switching object locations revealed dogs expected actors to target the goal object, not just the location.

Abstract

Human newborns preferentially attend to self-propelled objects, and three-month-olds expect them to act in a goal-directed manner. Dogs also prefer animate objects, and anticipate human actions to be goal-driven, but it is unclear whether perceiving an object as animate leads to the expectation that it has goals. Here, first dogs observed either (1) a human moving around the room, (2) a robot interacting with a human, (3) a robot displaying self-propelled motion, or (4) a robot moving ambiguously. Next, the human or the robot repeatedly approached one of two objects. Finally, the objects’ places were switched, and the actor approached the same-object or same-location as before. We measured dogs’ look toward the objects after switching their locations. Dogs looked at the goal object before the actor turned toward either object, and looked longer at the goal object when the actor moved in a route-consistent, instead of a goal-consistent manner. These suggest that irrespectively of the actor type, dogs anticipated it to approach the goal-object, and the actor violated this expectation when moving to the same location. Thus, dogs’ goal attribution is not uniquely tied to human action, but it can be elicited by broader features of animacy.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-26837-w.

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