Why do dogs tilt their heads?

In the iconic painting “His Master’s Voice (opens in new tab),” a terrier cocks his head as he listens to his owner’s voice coming from a gramophone. This gesture is 1 a lot of dog owners will be familiar with, but why do dogs tilt their heads?

In a 2021 study in the journal Animal Cognition (opens in new tab), researchers in Hungary performed the 1st scientific investigation of head-tilting in pooches. They identified that dogs might incline their heads as they are remembering information they come across meaningful.

“Head tilts in dogs are a relatively recognized behavior, but the most surprising point for me was that no 1 prior to us investigated it,” study lead author Andrea Sommese (opens in new tab), an ethologist (a scientist who research organic animal behavior) at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, told Reside Science. 

In an earlier 2021 study in the journal Scientific Reports (opens in new tab), Sommese and his colleagues analyzed videos from about the globe in which dog owners asked their pets to fetch them a toy by saying its name. While 33 pooches had been not in a position to find out the names of any new toys following 3 months of practice, seven gifted dogs had been in a position to find out a lot more than ten names in the course of that time, with 1 female border collie, Whisky, appropriately identifying 54 toys.

Although conducting the study that appeared in Scientific Reports, the researchers noticed that all 40 of the dogs cocked their heads in the course of the tests. The scientists subsequent investigated when the canines performed these tilts.

Connected: Why do dogs and cats run about in random bursts of speed?

Gaia the dog and owner Isabella sitting with each other with a huge pile of toys. They had been portion of a organic animal behavior study at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. (Image credit: Photo: Genius Dog Challenge / Isabelle)

In the following Animal Cognition study, the scientists identified that the gifted dogs tilted their heads 43% of the time when asked to retrieve a toy by name. The other pooches tilted their heads in only two% of these situations.

“We are not claiming that only gifted dogs tilt their heads whilst standard dogs under no circumstances do it,” Sommese mentioned. “Standard dogs also do that, some a lot more frequently than other folks, but in this particular circumstance, when the owner asks for a toy by its name, only the gifted dogs show a good tilt.”

These findings recommend that dog head-tilts are associated to sounds the pets have discovered to come across critical. 

“Dogs tilt their heads in a quantity of conditions, but it appears that they do this only when they hear a thing that is extremely relevant to them,” Sommese mentioned. “It appears that this behavior is strongly linked with sound perception, and it may possibly be a thing they do when they are attempting to listen a lot more closely, or perhaps when they are a bit confused, just like humans do.”

In addition, the researchers identified the side of the tilt was constant in the gifted dogs across 24 months of tests, but the favored side differed from canine to canine. This suggests 1 side of the brain of each and every dog might favor the mental activity underlying head-tilting, the scientists noted. Just as humans normally favor employing 1 hand more than the other, a lot of dog behaviors favor 1 side, such as the paw with which dogs attain for an item (opens in new tab), the path in which they favor wagging their tail (opens in new tab) and even the nostril they use a lot more in the course of sniffing (opens in new tab), they explained. 

Future analysis can discover what other sounds or contexts may possibly trigger canine head-tilting, mentioned Monique Udell (opens in new tab), a human-animal interaction researcher at Oregon State University, who did not take portion in the research.

“Research like this 1 are critical since they remind us that we, as humans, also have a lot to find out about what a dog’s physique language is communicating to us,” Udell told Reside Science.