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An image of the Ebbinghaus illusion highlighting which target circle humans and dogs perceive as being larger!

Back in 2015 a few dog behavior and cognition researchers and a human visual perception researcher went to a BBQ. It was on this lovely Australian summer day that we all jokingly wondered if dogs might be susceptible to illusions. I was starting my PhD at La Trobe University and had yet to decide on a dissertation topic. Who would have known that the conversation at this BBQ would have prompted the start of my interest in dog visual perception!

When I started my first study at La Trobe, we focused on the illusion right here, the Ebbinghaus illusion. When looking at this stimulus, specifically on the two centered circles (which we call targets), humans perceive the target circle on the right as being larger than the one on the left. However, we discovered that dogs identified the target circle on the left as being larger than the one on the right (and its not just because the whole stimulus on the left is larger in general!). In other words, dogs demonstrate reversed susceptibility to this illusion compared to humans!

This interesting finding in canine visual perception, along with others, has prompted this project! We want to learn more about this finding and see if the results generalize to a broader population of dogs to help us 1) learn more about illusion susceptibility in dogs but 2) evaluate the science of our methods!

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  • Keith Guerin
    Keith GuerinBacker
    A demonstration of this would make a great video for social media!
    Dec 07, 2020

About This Project

At the Thinking Dog Center, we investigate how dogs interpret the world around them. We've been asking the question "are dogs susceptible to illusions?" The goal of this project is to involve community scientists, and their furry friends, in at-home illusion experiments to help us answer this question, and also to study citizen science data quality and generalizability in dog cognition.

More Lab Notes From This Project

Blast off!

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