What’s your angle, pupper? A new study offers hints on the canine head tilt
Previous studies had suggested the tilt was an attempt to hear better. New findings show it has more to do with who’s talking, and the words themselves.
The canine head-tilt seems designed to make humans go “Aww”. It combines vulnerability, affection and a desire to understand or be understood.
What prompts it? Previous research suggested that dogs tilt their heads in an attempt to hear better. But a fresh study examined the direction of the tilts and found that the location of the speaker did not affect how the head moved, suggesting that the action isn’t meant to help the canine pick up sound better.
What the researchers found, instead, is that the head tilt often indicated that a dog was paying special attention.
The research project, led by animal science researcher Andrea Sommese of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, analysed the responses of 40 dogs. Studying what words, terms or voices caused canines to cock their heads, they found that it was a gesture usually made when the dog’s owner was issuing a command. Most often, the head-tilt occured after the human said a word that the canine associated with joy, such as “out”, “walk”, “treats”, “ball”, “car ride” or “yummies”.
The study observed the responses of two groups — 33 typical dogs and seven gifted word learners or GWLs — and found that gifted dogs tilted their heads far more often than typical dogs do (43% of the time, as against 2%). So they continued to study the responses of six of the GWLs, over two years.
One of the experiments involved owners asking the dogs to fetch a specific toy from another room. “It seems that there is a relationship between success in retrieving a named toy and frequent head tilts upon hearing [the toy’s] name,” Shany Dror, co-author of the study and a cognitive researcher with the department of ethology at Eötvös Loránd, said in a statement. “That is why we suggest an association between head-tilting and processing relevant and meaningful stimuli.”
The head tilt, then, isn’t about sound, but about processing a verbal cue and matching it to a mental image, states the study, published in the journal Animal Cognition in 2021.
Why this gesture? What’s going on in the canines’ brains when they make it? Those are the questions they will seek to answer next.
