2024-2027 FWF GRANT: TInfants and dogs´ perception of causality and animacy (IDCA) led by Jonathan Kominsky
This project addresses the question whether dogs and 6-16-month-old human infants have the same expectations of basic physical object interactions. Humans and dogs both evolved in a world that obeys Newtonian physical laws: Objects only move when something causes them to move. That “something” can be a collision with another object, or in the case of living beings, some kind of internal force. In fact, one of the ways humans and dogs might detect whether something is alive is by whether it moves in a way that physics only allows if the object can move on its own. In this project, we are testing whether dogs and infants pay more attention to or are surprised by events where objects move in a way that is impossible based on collisions alone. We also investigate whether infants and dogs expect objects that move on their own to have goals and intentions, whether they choose to approach or avoid these objects, and how humans and dogs might differ in their understanding of these events despite evolving in the same Newtonian world. To this end, we are using eye-trackers with both infants and dogs to measure both eye movements and pupil dilation, as the pupils of both species dilate when they are surprised or excited.