Dog owners have long suspected that their pets can tell what they are thinking just by the look on their face. Now a new study has verified that dogs do indeed read facial expressions just like people do.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, is from the University of Helsinki in Finland. It leads to the first evidence of emotion-related gaze patterns in a non-primate animal.
The researchers analyzed 31 dogs from 13 different breads. All were trained to stay still in front of a monitor without restraint. The team then used eye gaze tracking to determine how the dogs viewed emotions of humans and their fellow dogs.
The dogs were found to look first at the eyes, lingering in that area longer than mouth or nose, although the dogs based their full perception on scanning the whole face. Researchers say that this suggests that dogs piece together emotions from all facial features, not just one.
Results were consistent as dogs viewed a human subject, looking the person in the eye before examining the whole face. However, a change would occur if the dog viewed a picture of a human who had an angry face. In this case, all 31 dogs averted their eyes.
Researcher Sanni Somppi said that domestication may have allowed dogs to develop a sensitivity to threat signals of humans, which they respond to with signals of submission. They also found that the dogs had different responses based on whether the threatening expression was coming from a human or from another dog. They found that dogs looked away from threatening human faces, but looked longer at threatening dog faces.