How many times has it given you the feeling that your dog was making eyes at you ? Or putting on a face of pity so that you could give him a treat? Sure many but perhaps you thought they were your imaginations.
Well no, you weren’t seeing ghosts where there were none, a study by scientists at the University of Portsmouth (UK) has shown that you were not wrong because dogs do produce more facial expressions when humans look at them . This behavior evidences the intention of the pet to communicate with humans.
Canine cognition expert and doctor Juliane Kaminski led the study published in Scientific Reports . “Now we can be sure that the facial expressions of the dogs depend on the state of attention of their audience and are not just the result of the dogs being excited . In our study they produced many more expressions when someone was looking. Seeing sweets did not have the same effect, “says Kaminski in the publication. “The findings appear to support the evidence that dogs are sensitive to human attention and that expressions are active attempts to communicate, not simply emotional manifestations,” he continues.
Many mammals produce facial expressions that are an important part of their animal behavior. For a long time, it has been assumed that these and some human facial expressions are involuntary and the result of a specific and individual emotional state, not related to a response to someone. Additionally, Dr. Kaminski points to the possibility that the dogs’ facial expressions have changed as part of their domestication process.
For the study, the scientists recruited 24 dogs of various breeds between the ages of 1 and 12, all pets belonging to different families, and subjected them to two different stimuli: the attention of a human and food and to four different situations: the person. look at the dog, the person has his back to the animal, with food in his hand and without it. What was shown was that the dogs made facial expressions more often if the human paid attention to them, and surprisingly, the food had no effect on their expressiveness! This behavior of being more expressive in front of people indicates that there is a communicative intention since they wait for the person to look at them to do them.
“We knew that domestic dogs pay attention to how attentive a human is. In a previous study, for example, we found that dogs stole food more frequently when the person was on their back or had their eyes closed. In another study, we found that dogs follow the gaze of humans if they have previously established eye contact with the canid, so the dog knows that the change of gaze is directed at him “, the doctor declares in Scientific Reports .
The most frequent canine expressions
The most repeated expressions by the dogs in the study were sticking out their tongues and raising their brows . For the first, experts do not find a clear meaning since this gesture has been associated with panting to regulate body temperature and the feeling of stress. As for raising its brow, when the dog does, its eyes appear larger and in humans it has the immediate effect of eliciting compassion and tenderness, so we pay more attention to them.
