Why do dogs tilt their heads? New study offers clues

The article mentions that explanation and, presumably, they found it uncompelling.

You raise a good point--dogs (and cats) have been domesticated for so long that interaction with humans has become essential to their...worldview is the word, I guess?

Certainly various breeds have been bred for different purposes, and are very good at them.

It's a very good explanation because we think that's why domesticated dogs developed expressive brows: https://www.inverse.com/article/56744-dog-eyebrow-expression...

I hesitate on this explanation in this specific case just because the reason that we think head tilting is cute in dogs is because we also do it - and IMO we also do it when we're remembering something successfully - so I'd check for it in non-domesticated animals (wolves) and in other mammals.

It isn't an either/or situation-- turns out the intelligence we attribute to a social animal is related to our ability to communicate with it.. which shouldn't seem weird at all. It's not clear we have a good understanding of 'intelligence' /outside/ of the social context. The word itself just means 'understanding'.. and 'understanding' is just the read end of 'communicating'.

Coming up with a definition of intelligence that doesn't need an observer/understander is an interesting exercise; kinda demonstrates my point inasmuch as the word stops taking on a unified meaning and we find ourselves grasping around for the real Y-axis.

That said I think the head-tilting somehow increases cognition for a second, and the social signalling is an added benefit. Maybe it's a blood flow or cerebrospinal fluid thing. Big brains use a lot of blood oxygen and glucose while they're working. But that's just me BSing.

Regarding the cane corso-- fighting/guard dogs don't do the head tilt, but they're not gonna learn the words either...

Also, dogs evolved to communicate with dogs for ~(10E7) years, then learned to communicate with humans for ~(10E4) years. I think they mainly speak dog.. well, not dog, but puppy; the common path of mammal domestication being through juvenilization.

We feed a lot of strays and call them by whistle but whenever there's a new dog they always tilt their head.

It seems more likely they do it for concentrating during memory recall

> Or maybe they to it because we think it is cute

We think it is cute today. Did humans think it is cute thousands of years ago? Can you assume that humans that were domesticating wolves thought any animals were cute or attractive in some form?

It would be interesting to know if blind or blind-folded dogs also exhibit this behaviour.

My intuition is that head-tilting behaviour is more analogous to how we (humans) look up and the to left/right when concentrating. That feels less like augmenting the visual data and more like blocking visual input while we focus compute on recall and more complex thought.

> rotating an image a little, lets say tilt, can vastly increase or decrease your algorithm's performance

Wouldn't be the first time evolution used the trick. The eyes, in mammals at least, constantly wiggle even when fixed on an object. If the eyes stop moving entirely your field of vision fades out after some seconds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade

That's a good point! And dogs don't have great vision-- the the quality of their visual input might be a bound on their ability to recognize the small unsmelly objects that are important to humans. I wonder if they do the head tilt when doing the same test with odors instead of objects (not that it'd prove anything).

I didn't see where the VCA hospitals explained how tilting gives vertical information that is stated in the Smarter Every Day video. This was fun to see though, because watching my dog listening for movement underground (gophers, insects), and just in general, it occurred to me that a horizontal head position, only gives horizontal direction, but not whether it's above or below. Tilting solves that and 2 tilts, 90 degrees of difference, gives complete directional location. A slight rotation left or right, with one ear more forward than the other, can give range. It's amazing what a few hundred million years of evolution can come up with!

This article has different conclusion that the OP's article?

> It's always linked to how focus the dog is something

Pardon you?

Yep, my Spaniel seems to do it every time I say words she doesn't know/understand.

I do the same thing

> Is it really a mystery as to why canines tilt their heads when spoken to?

Yes, it is. "Complete concentration" or shifting ears this way and that way to better assess where sound comes from? I do something similar, when trying to localize the source of some odd sound, though I do more rotations around the vertical axis, and less around a horizontal ones. But humans more visually inclined species, so we mostly rely on eyes when searching for a source of a sound (it may go funny, when you misattributed sound, and then corrected a mistake, it feels like the sound instantly relocated from one place to the other).

Or maybe doggie tilting its head is trying to see whould your face look better if tilted?

Or it signals about its concentration on sounds, so other members of the pack kept quiet?

Or (a hypothesis attributed to a cat in some fictional book) doggie tries to hide how stupid it is? I like this one, because my dog acts this way, when I talk to it, whining on the perils of a working man in an inegalitarian society.

I wouldn’t think the difference in distance between the two nostrils would make it possible to differentiate smells spatially. You need some amount of separation between the inputs for a “3D view”. And both sides of the nose are ultimately connected into one nasal passage. I’m not sure where all of a dogs olfactory receptors are, but that wouldn’t help much either.

Moving the head around (from side to side) would make more sense to establish the direction of a scent. Then the strength could tell the dog the appropriate distance a smell is away too.

But if the head tilt was about trying to get a better perception of the world from a smell point of view, they wouldn’t be so consistent in their head tilts. The article said that dogs tend to tilt their heads in only one direction (left or right). And that the direction was always consistent for that individual dog. If they were trying to map out smells in 3D space, they’d move their heads around in more varied patterns.

That said, I do think your larger point of not assuming dogs (or any animals) have the same perception of the world as we do is correct. For example, we would identify a toy based almost entirely on how it looks. But a dog would definitely also take into account how it smelled. The same theory of "concentration" to explain the head tilt would be valid, regardless of what the dog is trying to remember -- look or smell.

Depends on the breed, more than you would think! Some dogs really go more by sight-- shepherds and sight hounds being good examples.

Source: had a beagle and an aussie

That seems to accord with what the fox does at 1:08 here: https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I

I’m having a hard enough time training a golden retriever. Border collies scare me.

I find that my head tilts when something I'm looking at is clearly 'wrong' in some manner.

Also, I have chickens and they frequently tilt their head when looking at me.

Just some more anecdata. :)

> Just wanna collect em all.

As another BC owner I approve of that message.

We have a young male and we’ve also noticed the difference in behavior compared to their female counterparts, the latter seem to be following more “to the letter” the behavior usually associated with a BC.

Our ears twitch towards the direction of sound too. Mine do sometimes at least.

Probably the people who spent months setting up an experiment to explain the behavior didn't consider this notion that occurred to the dilettantes thinking about it for 30 seconds.

I came here to ask the same question. I'd like to ask the researchers if they were able to study that. A quick google search shows not only do wolves cock their heads but other canides like foxes and coyotes do, too.

Ride in the car?

This was always interesting to me because I had a dog that only recognized the "alk" part.

You can imagine the disappoint when talking about socks, talks, locks.

Nothing wrong with fundamental research

yes, this is how to avoid biases and assumptions from leading to incorrect conclusions

I was just wondering if cats did it too - they at least have a bona-fide visual reason, since the slit pupils give them anisotropic focus, with sharper horizontal acuity for moving prey.

I'm surprised they didn't come across such an explanation from their supposed online search. It just seems too obvious a thing no to come up at least once.

I tilt my head when I'm trying to make sense of a word I heard, other people do it, anime characters do it.

It's good to study things rather than make the assumption but it's weird sometimes how they come at these animal behavior studies and at least make it sound like "huh! how strange, why on earth would animals do that?" when the same behavior happens in humans in roughly the same situations.

Yes, and if it's needed, they can just sit and move their head to up to 90°.