London - Loyally standing by our side through life’s ups and downs, the dog is cherished as man’s best friend.
But it seems that a dog’s love for humans might be slightly more fickle, after a study found that the animals can learn to love robots.
After simply being lured to food by the machines, the animals reacted by showing signs of companionship.
The study used a robot akin to a “piece of gym equipment” that possessed only minimal human features, such as a digital face and a pair of white gloves.
Despite this, dogs were happy to engage with the machines.
As part of the study, published in the journal Animal Cognition, dog-owners were asked to interact with the robot in front of their dog, shaking its hand and talking to it.
After being left alone with the animal, the robot would then point to hidden food, using a pre-recording of the dog’s name to communicate. The Hungarian researchers found that the animals were happy to interact with the robots, staring at the robot’s monitor throughout.
But when the robot’s human face was turned off and it simply communicated in a series of beeps, the dogs behaved more cautiously. When the experiment was repeated with the owner meeting a human instead of the robot, the dogs were more reluctant to engage with the unknown person compared to the robot.
Despite finding the dogs were unable to form as close a bond with robots as humans, when the robot displayed human characteristics, such as calling the animals by name, the canines spent more time by the robot’s side and looking at its face. - Daily Mail