Why Do Dogs Tilt Their Heads?

Is this adorable behavior rooted in sensory necessity or purposeful gesticulation? We explore what may be the cutest research ever.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Christian Seger. Here, our question for the day is why
do dogs tilt their heads? And I've got to warn
you this is one of those questions where the answer
is no, one really knows for sure. That's right. Humanity

(00:23):
has created a telescope that can observe stuff thirteen point
five billion light years away and nail polish that dries
in under sixty seconds. But we don't know exactly why
dogs do this cute thing, but we do have some
educated guesses. They tend to fall into three categories, site, sound,
and psychology. Site is the easy one. Imagine that you

(00:43):
have a snout at certain angles, it would block certain
parts of your vision. We know that pooches can watch
human faces and respond appropriately to expressions of emotion like
happiness or anger. Research published over the past couple of
years has found that dogs systematically look at our entire faces,
especially our eyes, to get a handle on our emotions.

(01:05):
They also remember our expressions and associate happy faces with
positive outcomes and angry faces with negative outcomes. So it
makes sense that a dog would tilt its head to
better see your face, and therefore determine whether treats are
on the way, but not all dogs have long muzzles.
If site were the only factor in head tilting breakas

(01:27):
aphelic babies like pugs, for instance, would never tilt over.
On Psychology Today, dog behavior writer Dr Stanley Coren shared
the results of his informal survey of five eighty two
dog owners. Of those, seventy one of people who owned
longer faced pops said their dogs frequently tilt their heads

(01:48):
when spoken to. In comparison, just fifty of people who
owned short snouted dogs reported frequent head tilting. The difference
is statistically significant, but it indicates that something else is
contributing to this behavior. Let's look at sound. For instance,
dogs hearing tends to be at least twice as sensitive

(02:08):
as humans. We hear sound waves that occur in the
range of about twenty to twenty vibrations per second, or hurts. Dogs,
depending on their breed and age, can hear sounds of
about forty to sixty five thousand hurts, meaning they can
detect sounds of much higher pitches from much further away.

(02:29):
Dogs cope with all that audio information partially by moving
around their pina Their fuzzy, scritchable outer ears, So some canines,
especially those with floppy pina covering the front of their
ear openings, may tilt their heads to move their pinna
and hone in on the sounds you're making. Furthermore, dogs
have muscles that let them better process sounds in their

(02:52):
middle ears. Those muscles just happen to be governed by
part of the brain stem called the nucleus ambiguous, which
just happens to also govern facial expressions, gaze vocalizations, and
head movements. This could mean that dogs reflexively tilt their
heads sort of as a byproduct of trying to concentrate

(03:13):
on a sound, or, as Stephen R. Lindsay says in
his Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training, that brain
stem connection could encourage head tilting as a form of communication,
meaning that my dog Winchester, that's his name. For instance,
when he tilts his head, he's trying to say that
he's paying attention. Lindsay notes that in his twenty five

(03:36):
years of training experience, socially apprehensive dogs don't tilt as much,
But as with all studies into animal behavior, this psychology
factor is the most difficult to figure out. Some researchers
suggest that dogs tilt their heads so often because they
know we find it so stinking adorable, specifically because we

(03:58):
respond with praise or other positive feedback when they tilt.
Studies have shown that dogs use social cues with humans
that they don't use with each other, like direct eye contact,
to elicit positive responses. Maybe all that head tilting is
just the very cutest form of emotional manipulation. Check out

(04:23):
the brainstuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.