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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and I've got a classic episode of

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff for you today from the vault the topic

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Speaker 1: why do dogs tilt their heads? I'll let our former host,

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Speaker 1: Christian Sager take it away, Hey, brain Stuff. Christian Sager here.

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Speaker 1: Our question for the day is why do dogs tilt

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Speaker 1: their heads? And I've got to warn you this is

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Speaker 1: one of those questions where the answer is no, one

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Speaker 1: really knows for sure. That's right. Humanity has created a

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Speaker 1: telescope that can observe stuff thirteen point five billion light

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Speaker 1: years away and nail polish that dries in under sixty seconds.

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Speaker 1: But we don't know exactly why dogs do this cute thing,

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Speaker 1: but we do have some educated guesses. They tend to

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Speaker 1: fall into three categories, site, sound, and psychology. Site is

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Speaker 1: the easy one. Imagine that you have a snout at

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Speaker 1: certain angles, it would block certain parts of your vision.

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Speaker 1: We know that pooches can watch human faces and respond

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Speaker 1: appropriately to expressions of emotion like happiness or anger. Research

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Speaker 1: published over the past couple of years has found that

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Speaker 1: dogs systematically look at our entire faces, especially our eyes,

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Speaker 1: to get a handle on our emotions. They also remember

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Speaker 1: our expressions and associate happy faces with positive outcomes and

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Speaker 1: angry faces with negative outcomes. So it makes sense that

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Speaker 1: a dog would tilt its head to better see your

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Speaker 1: face and therefore determine whether treats are on the way.

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Speaker 1: But not all dogs have long muzzles. If site were

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Speaker 1: the only factor in head tilting, breakas aphelic babies like pugs,

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Speaker 1: for instance, would never tilt over On psychology Today, dog

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Speaker 1: behavior writer Dr Stanley Coryne shared the results of his

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Speaker 1: informal survey of five eighty two dog owners. Of those,

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Speaker 1: seventy one of people who owned longer face pops said

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Speaker 1: their dogs frequently tilt their heads when spoken to. In comparison,

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Speaker 1: just of people who owned short snouted dogs reported frequent

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Speaker 1: head tilting. The difference is statistically significant, but it indicates

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Speaker 1: that something else is contributing to this behavior. Let's look

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Speaker 1: at sound. For instance, dogs hearing tends to be at

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Speaker 1: least twice as sensitive as humans. We hear sound waves

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Speaker 1: that occur in the range of about twenty to twenty

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Speaker 1: thod vibrations per second or hurts. Dogs, depending on their

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Speaker 1: breed and age, can hear sounds of about forty to

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Speaker 1: sixty five thousand hurts, meaning they can detect sounds of

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Speaker 1: much higher pitches from much further away. Dogs cope with

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Speaker 1: all that audio information partially by moving around their pina,

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Speaker 1: their fuzzy, scritch able outer ears. So some canines, especially

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Speaker 1: those with floppy pina covering the front of their ear openings,

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Speaker 1: may tilt their heads to move their pina and hone

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Speaker 1: in on the sounds you're making. Furthermore, dogs have muscles

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Speaker 1: that let them better process sounds in their middle ears.

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Speaker 1: Those muscles just happen to be governed by part of

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Speaker 1: the brain stem called the nucleus ambiguous, which just happens

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Speaker 1: to also govern facial expressions, gaze, vocalizations, and head movements.

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Speaker 1: This could mean that dogs reflexively tilt their heads sort

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Speaker 1: of as a byproduct of trying to concentrate on a sound, or,

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Speaker 1: as Stephen R. Lindsay says in his Handbook of Applied

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Speaker 1: Dog Behavior in Training, that brain stem connection could encourage

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Speaker 1: head tilting as a form of communication, meaning that my

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Speaker 1: dog Winchester, that's his name. For instance, when he tilts

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Speaker 1: his head, he's trying to say that he's paying attention.

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Speaker 1: Lindsay notes that in his twenty five years of training experience,

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Speaker 1: socially apprehensive dogs don't tilt as much, but as with

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Speaker 1: all studies into animal behavior, this say ecology factor is

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Speaker 1: the most difficult to figure out. Some researchers suggest that

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Speaker 1: dogs tilt their heads so often because they know we

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Speaker 1: find it so stinking adorable, specifically because we respond with

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Speaker 1: praise or other positive feedback when they tilt. Studies have

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Speaker 1: shown that dogs use social cues with humans that they

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Speaker 1: don't use with each other, like direct eye contact, to

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Speaker 1: elicit positive responses. Maybe all that head tilting is just

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Speaker 1: the very cutest form of emotional manipulation. Today's episode was

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Speaker 1: produced by Tyler Clang and written by me for the

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Speaker 1: t public dot com slash brain stuff. For more on

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Speaker 1: this and lots of other heck and adorable topics, visit

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Speaker 1: our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. M HM