Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Christian Seger. Here, our question for the day is why
Speaker 1: do dogs tilt their heads? And I've got to warn
Speaker 1: you this is one of those questions where the answer
Speaker 1: is no, one really knows for sure. That's right. Humanity
Speaker 1: has created a telescope that can observe stuff thirteen point
Speaker 1: five billion light years away and nail polish that dries
Speaker 1: in under sixty seconds. But we don't know exactly why
Speaker 1: dogs do this cute thing, but we do have some
Speaker 1: educated guesses. They tend to fall into three categories, site, sound,
Speaker 1: and psychology. Site is the easy one. Imagine that you
Speaker 1: have a snout at certain angles, it would block certain
Speaker 1: parts of your vision. We know that pooches can watch
Speaker 1: human faces and respond appropriately to expressions of emotion like
Speaker 1: happiness or anger. Research published over the past couple of
Speaker 1: years has found that dogs systematically look at our entire faces,
Speaker 1: especially our eyes, to get a handle on our emotions.
Speaker 1: They also remember our expressions and associate happy faces with
Speaker 1: positive outcomes and angry faces with negative outcomes. So it
Speaker 1: makes sense that a dog would tilt its head to
Speaker 1: better see your face, and therefore determine whether treats are
Speaker 1: on the way, but not all dogs have long muzzles.
Speaker 1: If site were the only factor in head tilting breakas
Speaker 1: aphelic babies like pugs, for instance, would never tilt over.
Speaker 1: On Psychology Today, dog behavior writer Dr Stanley Coren shared
Speaker 1: the results of his informal survey of five eighty two
Speaker 1: dog owners. Of those, seventy one of people who owned
Speaker 1: longer faced pops said their dogs frequently tilt their heads
Speaker 1: when spoken to. In comparison, just fifty of people who
Speaker 1: owned short snouted dogs reported frequent head tilting. The difference
Speaker 1: is statistically significant, but it indicates that something else is
Speaker 1: contributing to this behavior. Let's look at sound. For instance,
Speaker 1: dogs hearing tends to be at least twice as sensitive
Speaker 1: as humans. We hear sound waves that occur in the
Speaker 1: range of about twenty to twenty vibrations per second, or hurts. Dogs,
Speaker 1: depending on their breed and age, can hear sounds of
Speaker 1: about forty to sixty five thousand hurts, meaning they can
Speaker 1: detect sounds of much higher pitches from much further away.
Speaker 1: Dogs cope with all that audio information partially by moving
Speaker 1: around their pina Their fuzzy, scritchable outer ears, So some canines,
Speaker 1: especially those with floppy pina covering the front of their
Speaker 1: ear openings, may tilt their heads to move their pinna
Speaker 1: and hone in on the sounds you're making. Furthermore, dogs
Speaker 1: have muscles that let them better process sounds in their
Speaker 1: middle ears. Those muscles just happen to be governed by
Speaker 1: part of the brain stem called the nucleus ambiguous, which
Speaker 1: just happens to also govern facial expressions, gaze vocalizations, and
Speaker 1: head movements. This could mean that dogs reflexively tilt their
Speaker 1: heads sort of as a byproduct of trying to concentrate
Speaker 1: on a sound, or, as Stephen R. Lindsay says in
Speaker 1: his Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training, that brain
Speaker 1: stem connection could encourage head tilting as a form of communication,
Speaker 1: meaning that my dog Winchester, that's his name. For instance,
Speaker 1: when he tilts his head, he's trying to say that
Speaker 1: he's paying attention. Lindsay notes that in his twenty five
Speaker 1: years of training experience, socially apprehensive dogs don't tilt as much,
Speaker 1: But as with all studies into animal behavior, this psychology
Speaker 1: factor is the most difficult to figure out. Some researchers
Speaker 1: suggest that dogs tilt their heads so often because they
Speaker 1: know we find it so stinking adorable, specifically because we
Speaker 1: respond with praise or other positive feedback when they tilt.
Speaker 1: Studies have shown that dogs use social cues with humans
Speaker 1: that they don't use with each other, like direct eye contact,
Speaker 1: to elicit positive responses. Maybe all that head tilting is
Speaker 1: just the very cutest form of emotional manipulation. Check out
Speaker 1: the brainstuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.