A new study says dogs rely on their sight to understand the world, and the world they see looks vastly different from ours. The research, bolstered by some high-tech doggy goggles, is finally showing us how dogs actually see things. For years, we just assumed dogs were essentially colorblind, seeing the world in black and white. Our assumptions were incorrect.
Publishing their findings in Cognitive Science, researchers strapped some eye-tracking goggles on 11 dogs and let them go about their daily walks along a predetermined route. The eye-tracking device detected over 20,000 instances of dogs focusing their attention on specific things, which the researchers whittled down to exactly 11,698 after removing all the things the dogs looked at when they went into one of their sniffing trances.
They found that dogs are intentionally looking at things that interest them. That includes people (they look at us a lot), plants, passing vehicles, and pavement. Dogs are just trying to make sense of the world around them, and every dog does it a little differently. One pooch in the study was obsessed with a campus shuttle bus, while others ignored them entirely.
One of the study’s major findings is that dogs can see color, just not as much as we can. Humans are trichromats, meaning we can see three types of color cones: red, green, and blue. Dogs are dichromats, meaning they’ve only got two, and they’re not black and white. Dogs see in yellow and blue.
Dogs don’t see with the same clarity we do, either. Their visual acuity is blurrier, like walking around with perpetually smudged glasses. But there was one universal focal point: humans. Dogs look at people more than anything else, including other dogs. They even adjust how they look at us. Strangers received lingering stares while familiar friends and family got quick glances.
When dogs look around, they’re just trying to figure out the world. They know their friends from strangers, they understand the gist of things, even if they can’t quite visually comprehend as well as we can. But there’s one thing that’s for sure is that as long as they can see, they’ll always be able to tell when there’s a friend nearby.
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