Struggling to get your dog to fetch your slippers? Scientists who strapped eye-tracking helmets to a bunch of dogs have found the perfect tactic to get them to pay attention.
Both pointing and staring at an object is the best way for dog owners to get their pets to follow directions, according to a new study on Wednesday. The owner’s gaze and gesture are useful separately, “but combined they are stronger,” said lead study author Christoph Voelter of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.
The team of Austrian researchers put headgear on 20 dogs to detect exactly where the pooches looked when they were confronted with a range of scenarios.
Photo: AP
The test subjects included eight mongrels as well as Staffordshire terriers, Australian shepherds and poodles.
For the experiment conducted in the university’s Clever Dog Lab, each canine faced a scientist on their knees. A bowl was placed on each side of the scientist, only one of which contained a hidden treat.
The dogs were then presented with five different scenarios, six times each.
The scientists would point at the bowl while staring at the dog, or point and look at the bowl at the same time, or look only at the bowl.
They even used the classic prank that many dog owners play on their pets — they pretended to throw a ball in the direction of the bowl, while really keeping it in their hand.
Recordings from the headgear showed that the dogs fared best when the scientist both pointed and stared at the bowl that contained the treat.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they did the worst when the scientists pretended to throw the ball.
DO THEY UNDERSTAND?
For the researchers, this finding pointed towards the hypothesis that dogs follow human referential communication cues, rather than simply directional ones.
In other words, the dogs could understand the meaning of the information they were being given — in this case, a treat is that way — rather than just running in the direction they are being pointed.
But the researchers were careful not to hastily draw conclusions.
Exactly how much the dogs understood what is happening remains an open question, Voelter said.
“Is it for them more like an imperative directive to go somewhere? Or do they understand it more in a communicative way?” he said.
More research in this field of natural pedagogy would be needed, according to the study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
The field normally studies how communication clues — such as pointing and looking at an object while naming it — help young children learn the names of everything around them.
The researchers are also looking into how this works for dogs, Voelter said. The next step is figuring out whether dogs are also better at learning and memorising things “when we address them,” he added.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
RSS