For a dog lover, nothing is more debilitating than a dog’s head tilted to its side and its ears dangling along the way. But why do dogs tilt their heads so often? In a new paper, succinctly titled “Exploratory analysis of head bows in dogs,” researchers speculate that these cute head bows may be linked to increased attention in dogs because their lateral brain functions help them process information.
The study, published in the journal Animal Cognition, enlisted the help of 40 dogs who participated in another study that examined Fugazza and colleagues bringing toys with learned names as directed by a human. The researchers paid particular attention to the bowing of the dogs’ heads when observing the resulting difficulties. They noted whether the dogs bowed their heads and in which direction they bowed.
Seven of the dogs included in the study were classified as gifted word learners (GWLs), who have proven quite adept at learning the names of objects. The remaining 33 dogs were family dogs who underwent three months of training to become sufficiently familiar with the names of the toys.
The results of the study showed that GWL dogs tilted their heads significantly more than family dogs, and the tilt direction had nothing to do with the owner’s location or sound source. Because all dogs are trained to be equally familiar with toys prior to study, the researchers say the popularity of the toy is unlikely to be the tilt trigger.
Instead, they suggest that bowing may be in response to expressive words, which may explain why GWL dogs bowed more frequently during the observational study. So head tilt may be an indication of the dog’s increased attention and may indicate a relationship between head tilt direction and the dog’s neural processing of human voices.
“In the context of object verbal labels, stimulus familiarity alone was not sufficient to elicit head bows,” the study authors say. Head tilts may also possibly be related to the formation of a cross-modal match in dogs’ memory (for example, a name to a visual image) when they hear the name of the toy.”
The explanation continues: “There is evidence for lateralization in the processing of human vocalizations in the canine brain, but the small number of GWL dogs in this study precludes investigation of a population-level validation bias. Future studies with a larger sample size will investigate neural correlates of human vocalizations with the head tilt direction. It can combine behavioral and neural approaches to reveal the relationship between
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