This is what I was thinking too. I would put forth that humans don’t “see” photos either, until we ignore that it’s a photo. The colours are wrong, the colours shift under light, it looks odd from different angles and distances, it’s 2D, it’s the wrong size - these are all things we’ve learned to ignore. We’re usually not aware of this until we find something better - going from b/w TV to colour, or to HD, but our man-made images are not really like the real world.
My dog enjoyed the movie Balto, which surprised me because she hated the book.
Dogs can’t see photos because a “photo” doesn’t exist in a dog’s belief system. Therefore, it is literally invisible to it.
And dogs might be thinking something like “why don’t these humans react to that smell, it’s so obvious.”
No doubt smell is an issue, but if it were the only issue, dogs wouldn’t react to dogs seen through glass, yet they do.
The first time most dogs see themselves in a mirror, they react at first. They pretty quickly realize that whatever it is that’s going on behind that thing, it’s not important. (I believe they realize its themselves and therefore uninteresting, unlike some of the higher primates who, once they figure it out, start playing games with it.)
I have seen dogs learn to spot something in a mirror and then look around to see where the real (person, cat, etc) is. Often with some confusion, but no doubt with practice it would become automatic.
I do think that the lack of proper 3D cues is a big factor. Moving pictures give 3D cues. (I vividly remember when James Van Allen came to where I worked to give a presentation on the recent Voyager planetary flyby images. He ran a movie that started with a still of Jupiter with its 4 Gallilean moons. After a minute or so of narration, the motion started, and it startled me how all of a sudden the flat image came to life and looked 3D.) It may be that dogs who do not respond to pictures but do respond to TV are picking up the 3D cues caused by motion.
It may also be that they’re responding to the synchronization between image and sound, as well. My current and previous dogs both ignored TV completely, unless on TV a doorbell rings or a dog barks, after which they’d do their normal behavior for those sounds, without realizing it was attributable to the TV (they’d run to the front door.) The really odd bit was that both dogs respond to doorbells that sound nothing like our doorbell, or like any real doorbell that they’d ever heard as far as I could figure! How do they know?
I’ve read of a few studies of primitive people viewing images that gave some surprising results (especially regarding perception of color). I don’t remember the details, but I do believe that we learn to interpret a flat image as an image of a 3D object. I suspect that some animals as smart as dogs could be trained to recognize objects in images. An experiment would have to be carefully constructed not to conflate “recognizing objects” with “responding to specific visual patterns”, though. For example:
- train it to give the same response for a specific object or its picture
- retrain the response to the object, without using the picture
- measure the response to the picture
If the response is the same as for the object, that would corroborate my hypothesis. That is, I bet some dogs could learn it and others couldn’t. I bet most chimps could, with very little difficulty.
The Master speaks. (Not very extensively, alas, although there is an entertaining story about a dog who actually could perceive a photo of another dog.)
One of my dogs will run and bark at any animal on TV that is moving; it doesn’t have to be a dog. He doesn’t care about humans on TV. Last night it was chipmunks and various mouse species. He growls, runs at the TV, picks up one of his toys, and shakes it, showing the animal on TV who is boss. He has never attempted to look behind the TV.
When I play videos on the computer he growls and runs out of the room, but only because he thinks it is an intruder somewhere else in the house. When I put him on my lap and showed him video of our other dog, he uttered what I can only translate as “huh? that’s creeping me out” and didn’t attack.