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Are Dogs Impaired at Perceiving Motion?
Studies comparing dogs and humans find dogs are quite poor at detecting motion.
Posted April 29, 2022 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- It is well-known that dogs have certain superior perceptual abilities compared to humans, like smell and hearing.
- Not as much is known about how dogs perceive motion.
- Recent studies show that dogs are remarkably impaired in detecting noisy motion and slow movement, compared to humans.
- Whether these impairments depend on age, breed, or individual differences among dogs will require additional research.
It is well known that there are large differences between dogs' and humans' perceptual abilities. For example, dogs have about 50 times as many smell receptors as humans do, allowing them to navigate their environment using smell. Dogs also have a broader range of hearing than humans and are able to hear frequencies as high as 50,000 Hz (where humans lose sensitivity at around 20,000 Hz).
In terms of visual processing, we also know that dogs are less sensitive to colors than humans: They have only two types of cone cells in their retinas, compared to three for humans, and their central vision is not as densely populated with cones as ours. However, not as much is known about how well (or poorly) dogs are able to perceive motion.
Having recently adopted an 8-week-old puppy, I have noticed through observation certain differences in the way our puppy perceives motion. Although Archie (pictured left) is still young, his general visual capacities seem normal: He makes eye contact when we talk to him, he can find treats in the grass, he can run to retrieve his toy, and so forth. However, it has become clear that his motion perception abilities are lacking. For example, if Archie and I are playing with a chew toy, once I toss it, even a few feet away, Archie seems to completely lose track of it—as if the toy becomes invisible to him as soon as it is thrown.
Curious whether this was something unique to our puppy, his breed (some sort of labrador/Shephard mix), or something more general about dog vision, I started digging into the literature. What I found confirmed my suspicions.
Dogs seem to have particularly poor visual motion detection abilities.
In one set of studies by Orsolya Kanizsár and colleagues (2017), dogs were trained in a motion detection task. They were presented with two screens: one showing a set of randomly moving dots (0 percent coherence) and one showing dots where some percentage of them (e.g., 80 percent) were moving in a coherent direction. The dogs were trained to touch the screen containing the coherent motion and received verbal and food reward for doing so. Once successfully trained on the task, the experimenters reduced the percentage of coherently moving dots to find the minimum threshold: They found that dogs needed about 42 percent of dots to move coherently in order to perform the task above the chance level. By comparison, humans only needed 5 percent of dots to move coherently to correctly detect the motion—a threshold eight times lower than dogs.
In another set of experiments, Miina Lõoke and colleagues (2020) examined dogs' motion thresholds by asking: What is the slowest moving stimulus that dogs can detect? Using a similar procedure and stimulus set as Kanizsár et al. (2017), they presented dogs with moving dot displays, this time varying the speed of the moving dots. After being trained on the general task, the dogs required the dots to move at a speed of 0.76 degrees of visual angle per second. By comparison, humans are able to detect motion with speeds as slow as 0.1 degree of visual angle per second (Snowden & Kavanagh, 2006), again a nearly 8-fold difference, indicating much better motion perception in humans than in dogs.
The two studies above examined coherence thresholds and minimum speed for detection, but so far, no studies have measured the maximum speed at which dogs can detect motion. My own informal observations with Archie suggest that the maximum speed for dogs to detect motion is much lower than that for humans. Archie clearly had trouble seeing me toss his toy, but if I threw it very slowly or moved it across his visual field, he could follow it. He could also hear where it landed, or follow its scent. But visually, he was not able to track it when it moved quickly. These informal observations seem in line with the literature so far—dogs are not great at perceiving motion.
How is it, then, that our adult dog Lucy (pictured left) is so adept at catching flying balls? We often marvel at her incredible ball-catching antics and her athletic maneuvers, jumping and catching balls high in the air. The evidence so far suggests it is through learning, rather than through an innately good motion perception system, that dogs get good at this: learning how to read body movements, learning to predict the typical path of a ball, etc.
Research on dogs' visual perception is still in its early stages, with many open questions left to address. As Sarah-Elizabeth Byosiere and colleagues point out in their 2018 review, there are significant challenges in studying dog perception. Because dogs need many hours of training to perform an experimental task, studies often only include a small number of subject dogs. For example, the study by Kanizsár and colleagues tested just five adult dogs (each from a different breed). The study by Lõoke and colleagues was based on just six dogs. Although these foundational studies are helpful for understanding the average dog's visual abilities, they cannot account for the variability among dogs and how factors like breed, age, and individual differences manifest in these tasks.
Overall, much more research is needed to understand the perceptual abilities of dogs, how they develop over time, and how they compare to our own.
References
Kanizsár, O., Mongillo, P., Battaglini, L., Campana, G., & Marinelli, L. (2017). Dogs are not better than humans at detecting coherent motion. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 1-7.
Lõoke, M., Kanizsàr, O., Battaglini, L., Guerineau, C., Mongillo, P., & Marinelli, L. (2020). Are dogs good at spotting movement? Velocity thresholds of motion detection in Canis familiaris. Current zoology, 66(6), 699-701.
Byosiere, S. E., Chouinard, P. A., Howell, T. J., & Bennett, P. C. (2018). What do dogs (Canis familiaris) see? A review of vision in dogs and implications for cognition research. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 25(5), 1798-1813.
Snowden, R. J., & Kavanagh, E. (2006). Motion perception in the ageing visual system: Minimum motion, motion coherence, and speed discrimination thresholds. Perception, 35(1), 9-24.
