https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/o:3433 Dogs' expectations about occlusion events: from expectancy violation to exploration Völter, Christoph J. Christoph J. Völter 0000-0002-8368-7201 University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna Huber, Ludwig Ludwig Huber 0000-0002-0217-136X University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna Tomašić, Ana Ana Tomašić University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna Nipperdey, Laura Laura Nipperdey University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna / University of Leipzig The Royal Society text eng 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. Canis-Familiaris; Invisible Displacement; Physical-Properties; Maximum-Likelihood; Curiosity; Determinants; Regression; Knowledge; Solidity; Objects http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/api/object/o:3433/download 10.1098/rspb.2023.0696 https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/o:605 application/pdf Proceedings of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences 290(2003) (2023) Proceedings of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences 290 2003 927.67 kB 2023