phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at o:3433 DOI 10.1098/rspb.2023.0696 Dogs' expectations about occlusion events: from expectancy violation to exploration Previous research on human infants has shown that violations of basic physical regularities can stimulate exploration, which may represent a type of hypothesis testing aimed at acquiring knowledge about new causal relationships. In this study, we examined whether a similar connection between expectancy violation and exploration exists in nonhuman animals. Specifically, we investigated how dogs react to expectancy violations in the context of occlusion events. Throughout three experiments, dogs exhibited longer looking times at expectancy-inconsistent events than at consistent ones. This finding was further supported by pupil size analyses in the first two eye-tracking experiments. Our results suggest that dogs expect objects to reappear when they are not obstructed by a screen and consider the size of the occluding screen in relation to the occluded object. In Experiment 3, expectancy violations increased the dogs' exploration of the target object, similar to the findings with human infants. We conclude that expectancy violations can provide learning opportunities for nonhuman animals as well. eng Canis-Familiaris; Invisible Displacement; Physical-Properties; Maximum-Likelihood; Curiosity; Determinants; Regression; Knowledge; Solidity; Objects 2024-08-27T07:53:21.492Z LOMv1.0 Author BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Völter;Christoph J.; FN:Christoph J. Völter X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8368-7201 END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Huber;Ludwig; FN:Ludwig Huber X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0217-136X END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Tomašić;Ana; FN:Ana Tomašić END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Nipperdey;Laura; FN:Laura Nipperdey END:VCARD https://w3id.org/kim/hcrt/scheme https://w3id.org/kim/hcrt/text Textdokument Text LOMv1.0 yes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 application/pdf 949934 https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/o:3433 https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/api/object/o:3433/thumbnail LOMv1.0 discipline