Spontaneous Extraction of Human Social Cues from Biological Motion in Dogs

Dogs’ remarkable attunement to human social cues is a signature outcome of domestication. Biological motion (BM) perception provides a powerful window into how dogs process socially relevant information from movement cues. Here we investigated whether dogs spontaneously respond to walking direction conveyed by conspecific and heterospecific BM. We found that dogs followed the walking direction of human BM, whereas no such directional response was observed for dog BM. Moreover, dogs’ responses to human BM resembled their responses to human head orientation. These findings demonstrate that dogs spontaneously extract walking direction as socially meaningful cues from human movement, suggesting that domestication has shaped a human‑tuned social perceptual system in canine cognition.