The Internet has long been documenting our cats’ sinister fascination with Roombas. Now, new research suggests that dogs, loyal for millennia, are comfortable getting friendly with boxy machines.

Granted, at least some of that depends on the how the robot behaves, suggests a group of researchers at the Hungarian Academy of Science and Eötvös Loránd University, who published a new study recording the interactions between beast and bot in a new paper in Animal Cognition. …

The authors report that the dogs had a hard time keeping up with the game (not a surprise since dogs don’t really understand the concept of pointing). However, the dogs were more likely to find the food if the robot was friendly, or “social” to them before, by calling out the pooch by name, for instance. The dogs also spent more time around the robot if it had befriended them in an earlier session.