What is the dog thinking about when he tilts his head?

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Cat owners know that when you call its name, the cat will generally turn its head or ears as a response to you, but cats rarely tilt their heads. Dogs are different. They often tilt their heads to one side, as if they are thinking carefully about what you are saying. This is also different from parrots and chickens that turn their heads to listen to sounds with one ear.

Of course, it's not just dogs that can do this "head tilt", almost all canines can do it. Many people have different opinions on this.

When you ask your dog if he wants to go for a stroll in the park, you may see him respond by tilting his head in curiosity. This adorable canine behavior is familiar to dog owners, but no one really knows why man's best friend does this.

© Tenor

Research into why dogs tilt their heads is very limited, with scientists only publishing one study on a possible cause for the phenomenon. This study suggests [1] that dogs may tilt their heads when processing familiar words.

"For humans, when you recall a story or something, you tilt your head to one side and then have a mental image of something in your mind. Maybe it's the same with dogs," said Andrea Sommese, an animal cognition researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and the lead author of the study.

Many animals tilt their heads as they take in the sights, sounds and smells of the world, and Somese says this has mostly to do with having a preferred ear (or sometimes nostril).

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In other cases, it's to localize sounds. "Humans do it; birds do it; dogs do it," said Julia Meyers-Manor, an animal cognition researcher at Ripon College who was not involved in the study. " A lot of different species tilt their heads because it changes the angle at which your ear is so that the sound reaches one ear before the other. "

For example, barn owls are champions of head tilt, able to rotate their necks 270 degrees. This adaptation helps them focus their gaze (their eyes are largely immobile) on prey, and also allows them to point their sensitive ears in almost any direction, according to a 2017 study in the Journal of Anatomy.[2]

The Western Barn Owl's 14 cervical vertebrae can rotate much more than a human's 7. An owl has more cervical joints than you, but it has fewer occipital condyles than a human. You have two occipital condyles where your skull connects to your cervical vertebrae, but an owl has only one, which allows it to turn its head more than you do. © Gifer

However, in at least some cases of canine head tilt, the behavior appears to have more to do with information processing than just when the information is first gathered.

Somese and his colleagues studied a group of “gifted” dogs[3] who could learn to recognize the names of a number of toys, a feat that is nearly impossible for normal dogs. When comparing these high-achieving dogs with dogs that could not be trained to recognize the names of their toys, the researchers found that when the owners of the gifted dogs said the name of one of the toys, the dogs tilted their heads 43% of the time. Normal dogs only tilted their heads 2% of the time.

The gifted dogs tilted their heads in the same direction no matter where their owners were standing, suggesting the behavior is not about accurately locating the sound but about processing it and matching it to a mental image, Somese said.

“Perhaps normal dogs don’t do this because they don’t associate the name with the specific toy, so they can’t build that memory pathway effectively,” he said. But normal dogs might respond to something that’s associated with it, like the promise of a treat or a walk.

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Somese and his colleagues, who published their findings in 2021 in the journal Animal Cognition, have not yet been able to conduct follow-up studies on head tilt in canine cognition.

So why does head tilt seem to help dogs process familiar words?

This may have to do with brain lateralization, which is when certain stimuli are processed by areas on the left or right side of the brain. In humans, language processing is primarily concentrated on the left side of the brain.[4] Dogs process familiar human words on the right side of their brains, according to a 2016 study published in the journal Science.[5] But the same concept may still hold true.

Over time, it may also evolve into a social cue, showing others that you're active and engaged in what's going on around you, Meyers-Manor says. This social element may explain why humans interpret a dog's head tilt as attention and curiosity, and why we find it so cute.

References:

[1]link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-021-01571-8

[2]www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472525/

[3]www.scientificamerican.com/article/dogs-can-distinguish-speech-from-gibberish-and-tell-spanish-from-hungarian/

[4]www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/brain-sides-are-both-busy-in-new-language-learning/

[5]www.science.org/content/article/video-your-dog-understands-more-you-think

By Stephanie Pappas

Translated by tim

Proofreading/Rabbit's Light Footsteps

Original article/www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-dogs-tilt-their-heads-to-the-side/

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by tim on Leviathan

The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan