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Adaptation in human societies requires dogs to pay attention to socially relevant human beings, in contexts that may greatly vary in social complexity. In turn, such selective attention may depend on the dog’s training and involvement in specific activities. Therefore, we recruited untrained pet dogs (N = 32), dogs trained for agility (N = 32) and for animal assisted interventions (N = 32) to investigate differences in attention to the owner in relation to the dogs’ training/working experience. Average gaze length and frequency of gaze shifting towards the owner were measured in a ‘baseline attention test’, where dogs were exposed to the owner walking in and out of the experimental room and in a ‘selective attention test’, where the owner’s movements were mirrored by an unfamiliar figurant. In baseline, gazes to the owner by assistance dogs were longer than gazes by untrained dogs, which were longer than gazes by agility dogs. The latter shifted gaze to the owner more frequently than assistance and untrained dogs. In the selective attention test, assistance dogs showed longer and less frequent gazes towards the owner than untrained dogs, with intermediate values for agility dogs. Correlations were found for gaze length between the baseline and selective attention test for untrained and assistance dogs, but not for agility dogs. Therefore, dogs trained for Animal Assisted Interventions express enhanced sustained attention to their owners, and the lack of similar effects in agility dogs suggests that involvement in specific activities is associated with large differences in the patterns of attention paid by dogs to their handler/owner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed at (1) characterizing problematic behaviors expressed by dogs during walks in urban areas, (2) assessing how owners and non-owners perceive the phenomenon, and (3) evaluating if such problematic behaviors are associated with peculiar dog-owner attention patterns. Of 176 dogs filmed, 7 expressed excitement, 10 avoidance, and 5 aggression. Owners of problematic dogs considered their dogs less reliable and declared paying higher attention to them than owners of nonproblematic dogs. However, no difference was found in the perceived expression of problematic behaviors and in actual attention levels. This suggests that although somehow aware of their dogs' particular need for attention, problematic-dog owners are incapable of complying appropriately with such requirement. Non-owners perceived owners as less attentive and dogs as less reliable than what was perceived by owners but reported a similar occurrence of problematic behaviors. As for problematic dogs, their levels of attention to owners were not different from those of nonproblematic dogs. Aggressive dogs were the only ones in which attention levels varied significantly during the problematic behavior as they never looked at their owner during the aggression episodes. Avoidant dogs showed a trend for increased frequency of gazes to the owner during avoidance episodes, suggesting an attempt to establish communication with the owner, although the short duration of gazes may question their efficacy. Although we cannot provide a detailed analysis of factors that contribute to dogs' problematic behaviors in public, we identify a crucial point in the owners' lack of awareness and inability to deal with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Laboratory-based studies have shown that paying attention to humans is an important determinant of dogs' behavior. However, there are no data on how gaze is deployed between dogs and owners in non-laboratory conditions. This study aimed at characterizing dogs' and owners' attention to each other in 2 urban contexts, characterized by a different density of dynamic stimuli. Short videos of 176 dog–owner couples walking in streets and squares of the city center (CC) or green areas (GAs) of the center of Padova (Italy) were recorded. Continuous sampling was used for recording when dogs and owners were visually oriented toward their respective partners. These data allowed calculation of the average length of continuous gazes, number of gazes per minute, and the percentage of time in which dogs and owners were oriented toward their partners; also computed were the frequency and duration of mutual gazes. Eighty-three dogs and 32 owners never looked at their reciprocal partners for the entire duration of the video. On average, dogs were oriented to owners for 0.6% of the time and looked at them 0.5 times per minute, in bouts of 0.5 seconds. All parameters of dogs' attention were higher for off-leash dogs in GAs than for on-leash dogs in both GAs and CC. Although such limited attention to owners may reflect the requirements of ongoing action, it also suggests that most dogs do not need to look at their owners during walks, possibly because they are not confronted with situations of uncertainty. Owners were oriented to their dogs for 5.3% of the time and looked at them 1.7 times per minute, in bouts of 1.4 seconds. Owners' attention was lower in CC than in GAs, which may reflect differences between contexts in the number of distracting stimuli or in owners' motivations for looking at their dogs while walking in these different contexts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]