Dogs' Expectation about Signalers' Body Size by Virtue of Their Growls
Dogs' Expectation about Signalers' Body Size by Virtue of Their Growls
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0015175
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发表时间：
2010-12-15
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Range, Friederike
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Farago, Tamas;Pongracz, Peter;Range, Friederike
几项研究表明，狗和灵长类动物在听到信号发出后会利用信号发出者的心理表征，并能将这种表征与视觉形态提供的其他特征相匹配。最近，人们发现狗的咆哮是特定环境的，包含了呼叫者体型的信息。目前尚不清楚狗是否能利用这些编码信息。在这个实验中，我们测试了狗是否可以评估另一只狗的大小，如果它们听到一声激烈的咆哮，同时播放两张狗的照片。其中一个与咆哮的狗的大小相符，而另一个要么比狗大30%，要么比狗小30%。在对照组，使用噪音、猫图片或几何形状（三角形）的投影。结果表明，狗狗们会更迅速、更长久地注视与呼叫者体型相符的狗狗照片。在任何控制刺激中都没有发现这种偏好，这表明狗在听到呼叫者的声音时，对呼叫者有一种心理表征。
Several studies suggest that dogs, as well as primates, utilize a mental representation of the signaler after hearing its vocalization and can match this representation with other features provided by the visual modality. Recently it was found that a dogs' growl is context specific and contains information about the caller's body size. Whether dogs can use the encoded information is as yet unclear. In this experiment, we tested whether dogs can assess the size of another dog if they hear an agonistic growl paired with simultaneous video projection of two dog pictures. One of them matched the size of the growling dog, while the other one was either 30% larger or smaller. In control groups, noise, cat pictures or projections of geometric shapes (triangles) were used. The results showed that dogs look sooner and longer at the dog picture matching the size of the caller. No such preference was found with any of the control stimuli, suggesting that dogs have a mental representation of the caller when hearing its vocalization.