Do dogs (Canis familiaris) recognize a familiar species in cross-modal presentation?

A recent study has shown that dogs can recognize conspecifics in cross-modal presentations. The aim of the present study was to assess if dogs are also able to recognize other species and if different levels of exposure to them can influence this capability. The designated species was the cat, as it is relatively easy to find dogs with specific degrees of exposure. To this aim, we enrolled 60 pet dogs, half of which had at least one cat in their household, while the other half had never been living with cats. Using a cross-modal audio-video violation of expectancy paradigm, dogs were presented with either a cat or a dog vocalization followed by a cat or a dog video, thus facing either a congruent or an incongruent pair of stimuli. As expected, dog paid more attention, an indication of surprise, after being presented with the incongruent stimulus of dog vocalization followed by cat video (meanse=10.91.0) compared to the coherent dog stimuli (10.40.9; p=0.015 GLMM), supporting that they recognized the conspecific’s stimuli. However, this was not the case for the cat-related stimuli: the congruent cat stimuli (13.80.9) attracted more attention than the incongruent pair (13.40.9; p=0.011). This was likely due to the fact that the cat vocalization did not generate in dogs an expectation that could have been violated, and suggesting that dogs did not recognize the stimuli belonging to cats. In fact, the two cat stimuli might have elicited higher attention for being novel, again supporting the inability of dogs to recognize cats in this type of presentations. There was no effect of cohabitation with cats on attention paid by dogs (p=0.556). This indicates that living with another species in adult life does not seem sufficient to promote recognition with this methodology. This may be due to the exposure to a limited number/variety of cats or to the lack of exposure during the socialization phase.