Why do dogs tilt their heads?

In the iconic painting “His Master’s Voice (opens in new tab),” a terrier cocks his head as he listens to his owner’s voice coming from a gramophone. This gesture is a single numerous dog owners will be familiar with, but why do dogs tilt their heads?

In a 2021 study in the journal Animal Cognition (opens in new tab), researchers in Hungary performed the initially scientific investigation of head-tilting in pooches. They located that dogs may possibly incline their heads as they are remembering particulars they discover meaningful.

“Head tilts in dogs are a relatively recognized behavior, but the most surprising factor for me was that no a single just before us investigated it,” study lead author Andrea Sommese (opens in new tab), an ethologist (a scientist who research organic animal behavior) at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, told Reside Science. 

In an earlier 2021 study in the journal Scientific Reports (opens in new tab), Sommese and his colleagues analyzed videos from about the globe in which dog owners asked their pets to fetch them a toy by saying its name. Even though 33 pooches have been not capable to discover the names of any new toys just after 3 months of practice, seven gifted dogs have been capable to discover much more than ten names throughout that time, with a single female border collie, Whisky, appropriately identifying 54 toys.

Though conducting the study that appeared in Scientific Reports, the researchers noticed that all 40 of the dogs cocked their heads throughout the tests. The scientists subsequent investigated when the canines performed these tilts.

Connected: Why do dogs and cats run about in random bursts of speed?

Gaia the dog and owner Isabella sitting with each other with a massive pile of toys. They have been aspect of a organic animal behavior study at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. (Image credit: Photo: Genius Dog Challenge / Isabelle)

In the following Animal Cognition study, the scientists located that the gifted dogs tilted their heads 43% of the time when asked to retrieve a toy by name. The other pooches tilted their heads in only two% of these circumstances.

“We are not claiming that only gifted dogs tilt their heads though common dogs under no circumstances do it,” Sommese stated. “Common dogs also do that, some much more generally than other folks, but in this distinct circumstance, when the owner asks for a toy by its name, only the gifted dogs show a good tilt.”

These findings recommend that dog head-tilts are connected to sounds the pets have discovered to discover essential. 

“Dogs tilt their heads in a quantity of circumstances, but it appears that they do this only when they hear some thing that is quite relevant to them,” Sommese stated. “It appears that this behavior is strongly linked with sound perception, and it may well be some thing they do when they are attempting to listen much more closely, or perhaps when they are a bit confused, just like humans do.”

In addition, the researchers located the side of the tilt was constant in the gifted dogs across 24 months of tests, but the favored side differed from canine to canine. This suggests a single side of the brain of every single dog may possibly favor the mental activity underlying head-tilting, the scientists noted. Just as humans usually favor utilizing a single hand more than the other, numerous dog behaviors favor a single side, such as the paw with which dogs attain for an item (opens in new tab), the path in which they favor wagging their tail (opens in new tab) and even the nostril they use much more throughout sniffing (opens in new tab), they explained. 

Future investigation can discover what other sounds or contexts may well trigger canine head-tilting, stated Monique Udell (opens in new tab), a human-animal interaction researcher at Oregon State University, who did not take aspect in the research.

“Research like this a single are essential for the reason that they remind us that we, as humans, also have a lot to discover about what a dog’s physique language is communicating to us,” Udell told Reside Science.