cross modal perception of body size in domestic dogs (canis familiaris)交叉驯养狗的体型的看法(canis后裔).pdfVIP

Cross Modal Perception of Body Size in Domestic Dogs (Canis familiaris) Anna M. Taylor*., David Reby., Karen McComb Mammal Vocal Communication and Cognition Research, School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom Abstract While the perception of size-related acoustic variation in animal vocalisations is well documented, little attention has been given to how this information might be integrated with corresponding visual information. Using a cross-modal design, we tested the ability of domestic dogs to match growls resynthesised to be typical of either a large or a small dog to size- matched models. Subjects looked at the size-matched model significantly more often and for a significantly longer duration than at the incorrect model, showing that they have the ability to relate information about body size from the acoustic domain to the appropriate visual category. Our study suggests that the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms at the basis of size assessment in mammals have a multisensory nature, and calls for further investigations of the multimodal processing of size information across animal species. Citation: Taylor AM, Reby D, McComb K (2011) Cross Modal Perception of Body Size in Domestic Dogs (Canis familiaris). PLoS ONE 6(2): e17069. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0017069 Editor: Colin Allen, Indiana University, United States of America Received October 15, 2010; Accepted January 13, 2011; Published February 16, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Taylor et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was entirely funded by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) studentship to author AMT. The funders had no r