In the iconic painting”the voice of his master (opens in a new tab)“, a terrier tilts its head as it listens to its owner’s voice coming from a gramophone. This gesture is one that many dog owners will be familiar with, but why do dogs tilt their heads?
In a 2021 study in the journal animal cognition (opens in a new tab), researchers in Hungary conducted the first scientific investigation of head tilt in dogs. They found that dogs can tilt their heads while remembering details that seem significant to them.
“Head tilting in dogs is a fairly well-known behavior, but what was most surprising to me was that no one before us had investigated it,” said the study’s lead author. Andrea Sommese (opens in a new tab)an ethologist (a scientist who studies the natural behavior of animals) at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, told Live Science.
In an earlier 2021 study in the journal scientific reports (opens in a new tab), Sommese and his colleagues analyzed videos from around the world in which dog owners asked their pets to bring them a toy by saying its name. Although 33 dogs were unable to learn the names of any new toys after three months of practice, seven gifted dogs were able to learn more than 10 names during that time, and one female border collie, Whiskey, correctly identified 54 toys.
While conducting the study that appeared in Scientific Reports, the researchers noticed that all 40 dogs tilted their heads during the tests. The scientists then investigated when the canines performed these inclinations.
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In the following Animal Cognition study, scientists found that gifted dogs tilted their heads 43% of the time when asked to retrieve a toy by name. The other dogs tilted their heads in only 2% of these cases.
“We’re not claiming that only gifted dogs bow their heads while typical dogs never do,” Sommese said. “Typical dogs do that too, some more often than others, but in this specific situation, when the owner asks for a toy by name, only gifted dogs show good inclination.”
These findings suggest that dogs’ head tilts are related to sounds that pets have learned to find important.
“Dogs bow their heads in various situations, but they seem to do so only when they hear something that is highly relevant to them,” Sommese said. “It appears that this behavior is strongly associated with sound perception, and could be something they do when trying to listen more closely, or perhaps when they’re a bit confused, like humans do.”
Furthermore, the researchers found that the leaning side was consistent across the gifted dogs throughout 24 months of testing, but the favored side differed from canine to canine. This suggests that one side of each dog’s brain may support the mental activity underlying head tilt, the scientists noted. Just as humans often prefer to use one hand over the other, many dog behaviors favor one hand, such as the paw with which dogs reach for an object (opens in a new tab), the direction in which they prefer to move their tail (opens in a new tab) and even the nostril they use most during sniffing (opens in a new tab)they explained.
Future research may explore what other sounds or contexts might trigger canine head tilt, he said. monique udell (opens in a new tab)a human-animal interaction researcher at Oregon State University, who was not involved in the studies.
“Studies like this are important because they remind us that we as humans also have a lot to learn about what a dog’s body language communicates to us,” Udell told Live Science.
