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Ontogeny of dogs’ sensitivity to the human’s attentional state: Do the eyes have it?

2025· article· en· W4412980001 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueApplied Animal Behaviour Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicHuman-Animal Interaction Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersAlbert-Heim-StiftungAlaska Historical Society
KeywordsOntogenyPsychologyDevelopmental psychologyBiologyEndocrinology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Dogs have been shown to differentiate attentional states in humans in competitive situations over food or when they are told to obey a command. Here we test to what extent dogs' attention to a human's attentional state might be learnt ontogenetically. We exposed Labrador puppies (N=90) of different ages (6 weeks, N=18; 8 weeks, N=19; 10 weeks, N=18; 12 weeks, N=17; 16 weeks, N=18 and adult Labradors (between 1 and 11 years old), N=25) to a social interaction with a human experimenter during which the attention of the experimenter systematically varies (she either has her eyes open, eyes closed, is facing away or has her back turned). Dogs were free to roam throughout the whole trial, no food or communicative directives were given, and we recorded and analysed dogs unrestricted behavioural responses throughout the trials. Dogs of all ages oriented and reached towards the humans face more when the face was visible than when it was not visible. Interestingly, varying the status of the eyes (eyes open versus eye closed) did not seem to affect the dog’s response. Here we discuss that this might be because of the more neutral setting of the current study, which changes dogs’ perception of the relevance of human attention.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.613
Threshold uncertainty score0.491

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.361
Teacher spread0.341 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it