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What Are You or Who Are You? The Emergence of Social Interaction between Dog and an Unidentified Moving Object (UMO)
Open accessAbstract
Robots offer new possibilities for investigating animal social behaviour. This method enhances controllability and reproducibility of experimental techniques, and it allows also the experimental separation of the effects of bodily appearance (embodiment) and behaviour. In the present study we examined dogs' interactive behaviour in a problem solving task (in which the dog has no access to the food) with three different social partners, two of which were robots and the third a human behaving in a robot-like manner. The Mechanical UMO (Unidentified Moving Object) and the Mechanical Human differed only in their embodiment, but showed similar behaviour toward the dog. In contrast, the Social UMO was interactive, showed contingent responsiveness and goal-directed behaviour and moved along varied routes. The dogs showed shorter looking and touching duration, but increased gaze alternation toward the Mechanical Human than to the Mechanical UMO. This suggests that dogs' interactive behaviour may have been affected by previous experience with typical humans. We found that dogs also looked longer and showed more gaze alternations between the food and the Social UMO compared to the Mechanical UMO. These results suggest that dogs form expectations about an unfamiliar moving object within a short period of time and they recognise some social aspects of UMOs' behaviour. This is the first evidence that interactive behaviour of a robot is important for evoking dogs' social responsiveness.
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In experimental contexts, dogs appear to attribute animacy to objects that behave in seemingly agentive ways.
“Corroborating Darwin’s report, in experimental contexts, dogs appear to attribute animacy to objects that behave in seemingly agentive ways [87].”
From The social origins of consciousness (2025) · cites this paper as [87]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Gergely, A., Petró, E., Topál, J., & Miklósi, Á.
- Affiliations
- Eötvös Loránd University (HU)
- Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology (HU)
- Corresponding author
- Gergely, Anna
- Venue
- PLoS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2013-08-28
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- e72727
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3755977
- OpenAlex
- W2107997129
- Cited by
- 38
- References
- 36
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 2.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Repository of the Academy's Library (Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) (acceptedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- ELTE Digital Institutional Repository (EDIT) (Eötvös Loránd University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (133059)
- Hungarian Scientific Research Fund
- Hungarian Science Foundation (K-100695)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Animal Science and Zoology › Human-Animal Interaction Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Keywords
- dogs, social interaction, embodiment, gaze alternation, social responsiveness, problem solving, goal-directed behavior, human-robot interaction, animal social behavior
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Behavior, Animal, Dogs, Humans, Robotics, Social Behavior
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