Want your dog to focus on an object? Both Point & Gaze works best.

Dog goggles help scientists learn how to best get their attention
Combining two common gestures appears to do the trick.



Dog owners frequently try communicating with their pets by looking or pointing directly at an object, but a team at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna recently wondered if either method (or a combination of the two) worked best. Led by comparative cognition postdoctoral candidate Christoph Völter, researchers introduced various communication scenarios to dogs to learn the answer.

To evaluate the best human-to-dog strategy, a researcher first sat on their knees with a bowl on either side of them, only one of which contained a concealed treat. They then offered dogs five different scenarios repeated six times each: pointing, pointing and gazing, gazing, mimicking a ball throw, and a no-cue control. Each dog’s eye movement was then tracked to record how often they followed the gestures, followed by whether or not they heeded the commands.

https://www.popsci.com/science/dog-hand-eye-training/

In summary, mobile eye tracking provided evidence that after ostensive addressing dogs selectively follow certain directional cues to the indicated referent. The combination of pointing and gazing cues proved most effective in manipulating their overt visual attention as well as their subsequent choice behaviour. Pointing without gaze cues also affected the dogs’ attention and choice performance even though to a lesser extent whereas gaze cues alone were ineffective. Fake throwing had little effect on the dogs’ attention or choice behaviour either and in contrast to the conditions involving pointing and or gazing, even if the dogs looked at the target bowl following the fake throwing this did not lead them to preferentially choose this bowl. This study confirms the finding that dogs follow a referential cue to a target more than a directional cue alone [21]. Finally, the current study showed that mobile eye tracking can provide valuable insights into how dogs navigate their environment including the interactions they have with their human partners.

According to the ‘natural pedagogy’ framework [43], which aims to explain how humans acquire cultural knowledge, ostensive signals in humans do not only increase attention but also elicit a referential expectation and a genericity bias. Eye tracking could be used in the future to study whether ostensive cueing of an object also affects how dogs process information about this object, that is, whether ostensive signalling leads to better or qualitatively different memory encoding of the signalled object. Identity change paradigms have been used with human infants to study this issue in preverbal participants [44–46]. Following this approach, future studies might focus on whether jointly attending objects or locations not only affects dogs’ gaze behaviour but also whether it affects their subsequent information processing and memory encoding.

Mobile eye tracking could also be used in other dog populations, including puppies and shelter dogs, to shed more light on the ontogeny of their understanding of human referential communication. We know that dogs with varying levels of exposure to humans perform worse than pet dogs in studies of pointing comprehension [4–9]. It would be interesting to examine whether such differences are also found in their gaze following in response to human referential communication or whether their attention is similar even though it does not translate into choice performance. It would also be interesting to see in longitudinal studies either involving training or experience with humans [47] whether correct looks precede correct choices or whether they coincide over the course of the training. Finally, mobile eye tracking will provide information on how dogs with specific training backgrounds (such as guide dogs for the blind) respond to human communication and, more generally, how their attention differs from dogs without such specific training backgrounds.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.2765#d1e447