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Why do dogs tilt their heads? New study offers clues

196 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

gremloni 5y ago
My dog does this 100% of the time when I whisper the word treat. Probably has to do with sound.
kd0amg 5y ago
> A quick internet search turned up plenty of speculative results positing that dogs tilt their heads to hear better, to listen for specific words or tones, or to see past their snouts. Sommese found one poster hypothesizing that shelter dogs do it more often because they know on some level that humans find it irresistible. Amusing to see this play out again in the comments here
vanderZwan 5y ago
> all border collies I assume the control group was also border collies? Otherwise they might have instead discovered that border collies tilt their heads more often (which would also be interesting of course).
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Hm. I've got a border collie sleeping at my feet right now (a calm BC is a rarity...). We have two of them. One (the male, younger) does the head tilt a lot, but the other (our female) does not. What I find interesting in terms of this article is that the latter, the female, is a lot smarter, more agile, more focused, and has more of the classic border collie attributes ("the eye", intense focus, etc.) but head tilts a lot less. Instead she stares and does a lot of... ear antennae action. Instead of tilting her head, her (erect) ears wiggle all over the place, like they're ... tuning in. So this seems to contradict the findings of the study here where they seem to associate the head tilt with intelligence, I've always interpreted head tilt as confusion. But of course that's just a single data point. Ah, border collies. Just wanna collect em all.
- paganel 5y ago
  > 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.
- lsaferite 5y ago
  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. :)
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  I’m having a hard enough time training a golden retriever. Border collies scare me.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Border collies train you. They have the sweetest temperament, though. I was always a lab person until we got a rescue collie, and I just fell in love with them. They are pure intuition. And they just want to please you and have fun (which for them means working non-stop doing stuff). Their desire to please makes them pretty easy to train, it's just a matter of being consistent, which we are not. But they don't cause trouble in general once they know what displeases you because they really just want your approval so badly. In the hands of a more qualified trainer, our female would be an insanely talented agility or herding dog. So fast. So attentive. So sensitive.
    - mrtranscendence 5y ago
      Interesting! I mostly only know border collies by reputation, which is probably unfair. The pleasing temperament is why we went with a golden retriever; my girlfriend wants to train her as a therapy dog. But training has been difficult, due in no small part to how inconsistent we've been (and how rambunctious the dog is). We also can't get her to entirely stop play biting, which is frustrating. I love her to bits and would do anything for her, but I don't think I'll ever get a puppy again.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
My pup does the tilt, back and forth, pretty much 90% of the time if I talk to her in a sustained sing-song voice. She definitely understands a lot of words, and it definitely seems like she’s focusing to pick out meaningful words she does know from whatever other nonsense I might be saying.
lamontcg 5y ago
Grew up with German Shepherds that all did this. I actually find it pretty obvious that its about cognition. When they tilt their heads I can just about hear their brain working to figure out what you mean + want. They've got excellent hearing and they don't really need to improve it, they're just thinking about whatever stimulus they're reacting to. And probably did evolve to communicate that thinking pose to humans. Its a little bit of an "I've almost got it, can I get another hint?" kind of pose.
mojomark 5y ago
Watch [1] @ 1:08. Is it really a mystery as to why canines tilt their heads when spoken to? It's always seemed self-evident that they are hearing a sound that is of interest and they are evaluating to see if it's useful information. 1. https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  I do the same thing
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    ....Fido? How did you get online?
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      You'll never catch me! I'm going to play the piano next.
    - theaussiestew 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
  - richardatlarge 5y ago
    Me too, and when I do, my dog does too
  - pcurve 5y ago
    I chuckled at this... but it made me wonder if I also do it too. Not quite tilt, but squint, cock my head left and down.
- ordu 5y ago
  > 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.
bernardv 5y ago
Is it me, or do some researchers seem to start from a point of stark ignorance and thus a low bar for ‘findings’?
- sydthrowaway 5y ago
  Nothing wrong with fundamental research
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Little S, science… Nice to see you my old friend, now out of the way, I need whole 2 data centers to test this model of the milky way that I’ll use to predict what global temperatures would be if Hitler won, the testing performed by a singularity itself on loan from MetaFacebook5000, good thing we were able to leverage the entire country of Luxembourg to fund this, along with NIH money (so long as we promised to kick a puppy).
- beowulfey 5y ago
  yes, this is how to avoid biases and assumptions from leading to incorrect conclusions
lostsock 5y ago
I thought this was already established? I learnt about it from Smarter Every Day: https://youtu.be/Oai7HUqncAA?t=388 https://youtu.be/Oai7HUqncAA?t=388 Here is the source they reference: https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/why-dogs-tilt-their-heads https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/why-dogs-tilt-their-h...
- pcurve 5y ago
  This article has different conclusion that the OP's article?
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    And it documents a different study that uses a different method. It's as if the articles were written about different things.
- RRWagner 5y ago
  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!
  - asxd 5y ago
    It seems obvious in hindsight, but that's an interesting insight I hadn't thought of before. This got me curious about how we can roughly determine if a sound is coming from above or below us even without tilting our heads. A quick search led to this interesting but somewhat open-ended stackexchange answer: > Localization in the vertical plane (elevation) is less well investigated. As far as I know it is the shape of the outer ear (pinna) that transforms the frequency characteristic of incoming sound. In terms of directional hearing it is thought that sounds coming from above lead to a different head transfer function than sounds from below. This means that localization can only be accomplished when the sound has a particular familiar characteristic that is slightly disturbed in the frequency domain when encountered at different angles of elevation (Hofman & Van Opstal, 2003). [1] From this, it seems like the pinna is shaped in such a way that it filters audio differently depending on whether it came from above or below? Can anyone who has more experience with ears confirm or clarify this? [1] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/53207/how-we-can-localize-sound-vertically-up-down-and-front-to-back https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/53207/how-we-can...
klodolph 5y ago
Owls have “pre-tilted” ears… their heads are asymmetrical! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization_in_owls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization_in_owls
aasasd 5y ago
Afaik humans also rotate their heads a bit if sound comes from somewhere on the median plane, to get some inter-ear difference. And are not always aware of this behavior.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  Our ears twitch towards the direction of sound too. Mine do sometimes at least.
Procedural 5y ago
Wanna go for a walk?
- ravenstine 5y ago
  Ride in the car?
- scollet 5y ago
  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.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Our border collies know so many variants of "outside", "walk", "W-A-L-K" spelled out, "woods" (our back woods), "garden", etc. and N number of other words and are at the door before I even know that I'm going there, myself.
    - avisser 5y ago
      This hits home. I learned a new word when my mom started talking about "perambulation" around my Aussie to avoid premature excitement.
    - scollet 5y ago
      That's pretty amazing. We've adopted "treaties???" for rewarding our current dog and it works doubly to get her to distill that energy for a little bit.
  - laichzeit0 5y ago
    I get “talks” but how does socks and locks trigger him?
    - wiredfool 5y ago
      Socks imply shoes. And shoes imply walkies.
codr7 5y ago
Who knows? I've found I tend to tilt my head when I'm trying to find a different angle mentally, alone and when interacting with other people.
math0ne 5y ago
So it means they are trying to understand, basically the same thing humans use it for.
sideshowb 5y ago
Dogs can look up?
- Phenix88be 5y ago
  Yes, and if it's needed, they can just sit and move their head to up to 90°.
Phenix88be 5y ago
I have been a dog trainer for about 16 years now and see this behaviour countless time. Most commonly on shepherd typed dog. But some hunting dog do it too. It's always linked to how focus the dog is something. It's also when you repeat multiple time the same command that you trigger this behaviour. Like they focus on it.
- bradstewart 5y ago
  Yep, my Spaniel seems to do it every time I say words she doesn't know/understand.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > It's always linked to how focus the dog is something Pardon you?
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    "It's always linked to how focus[ed] the dog is [or] something" what was I instinctively read...
    - bool3max 5y ago
      Same, I didn't even notice the mistake. Could also be interpreted as "how focused the dog is _on_ something".
      - Phenix88be 5y ago
        You got it right !
ra120271 5y ago
I would, with no real foundation, posit that it was somehow related to human eye movements when recalling memories https://neurosciencenews.com/eye-movement-memory-15857/ https://neurosciencenews.com/eye-movement-memory-15857/
hellbannedguy 5y ago
I think animals are much more intuitive than we think. I once had young veterinarian tell me my dog didn't feel anything when having a Grand Mal Seizure while at the foot of my bed. She said, "They just don't feel like we do." I was to tired to even talk. I do know when Chester, my 150 lb. American Bulldog/pit mix, had the seizure he looked into my eyes, and wrapped his paws around me. He was still shaking. I have never seen an animal so scared. He wouldn't leave my side for a few days. I have a bunch of other instances where I could sware he was human, with human emotions. I still remember listening to those philosophy professors saying man is vastly different than animals. I didn't believe it then, nor now.
xchip 5y ago
TL;DR: "The team thinks it could be linked to mental processing—a sign of high attentiveness or concentration"
acosmism 5y ago
interesting no one mentioned- cats do something similar!
- Nihilartikel 5y ago
  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.
aaron695 5y ago
The comments (and the article) are a mess. It because it's good to move ears for sound direction, which everyone knows because we are smart, but somehow this article shows it's done during mental cognition. So either state why this article is wrong or adapt the theory.
ramesh31 5y ago
Do wolves do it though? Seems far more likely that, like many other dog traits, this is something that was artificially selected by humans as being cute.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  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.
- mhb 5y ago
  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.
marhee 5y ago
Dogs tilt their head to better determine the vertical location of a sound. That's always been my hypothesis. Dogs have two ears, spaced horizontally apart such that triangulation can be used to determine the origin of the sound by exploiting the small time difference in time for the sound to reach both ears. But vertically speaking the ears are in the same position. So to be able to better judge the vertical position of the origin of the sound, they title their heads in order to place the ears apart on the vertical axis.
- defgeneric 5y ago
  That seems to accord with what the fox does at 1:08 here: https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I
wombatmobile 5y ago
I do this to. In my case, I do it after I have heard or seen something surprising or puzzling. I do it while I am processing the information. It's a way to signal to the person or people I am with that I am offline i.e. not receiving further input through my eyed and ears whilst I am processing the data.
bregma 5y ago
Dogs are about 99% oriented around scent. Perhaps changing the angle of their two nostrils allows for a more accurate 3-D perception of their world? Asked to fetch a named toy, the dog "reads" the room in olfactory stereo to locate the object for retrieval. It's not particularly good science to assume the universe is limited to what humans are good at perceiving. I'm sure there are some potential publications in this somewhere.
- frazbin 5y ago
  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
- mbreese 5y ago
  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.
slingnow 5y ago
This seems almost too obvious to study. Have you never tilted your head when you hear (or even just think about) a piece of interesting / surprising / confusing information? Now, I don't know why _humans_ tilt our heads, but it has always been clear to me with my dogs that they are doing the exact same thing. They're pausing to think a little harder in response to something new.
- svachalek 5y ago
  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.
- GreenWatermelon 5y ago
  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.
abbaselmas 5y ago
Maybe it is not all related with sound but vision! it must be related with inputs to brain but it cant be only sound. If you ever work with computer vision, rotating an image a little, lets say tilt, can vastly increase or decrease your algorithm's performance. For example: early face detection algorithms were looking for T zone in your face from eyebrows to nose. (cheeckbones are generally brighter areas) However, those old algorithms were very bad at if the image is 180 degree rotated (T zone is not T anymore). Dont have to be 180 45 degree is enough for most face detection algorithms. In neural nets, artificial intelligence practices like augmenting data, rotate the image a little and give the same image as an input data namely Augmenting data improves algorithm performance. In my opinion the dogs multiply the input by rotating or tilting their head so that autmatically augmenting data!!! So that they can detect better whatever they were looking before. Computer scientist keep inspiring from nature but maybe its time to explain some phenomena with computer science methods. Researcher force themselves to find a new thing in computer area, maybe they go beyond nature sometimes unintentionally.
- retrac 5y ago
  > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
  - abbaselmas 5y ago
    > the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental, three-dimensional 'map' corresponding to the scene Your reference is very interesting for me because in computer vision we try to locate local features and try to match these local features, so that 3D correspondence can be extracted from multiple images which called structure from motion (SfM). Now I know, humans (and animals) also do the same thing!
- frazbin 5y ago
  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).
sandworm101 5y ago
Or maybe they to it because we think it is cute. The dog's evolution is totally tied to their interactions with humans. The head tilt is a form of communication, them telling us that they are doing a particular behavior. Those that head tilt would better communicate with people, resulting in better treatment, more breading opportunities and an evolutionary pressure towards more head tilting. These are border collies, a working dog designed to interact with a human handler. Take a look at something like a cane corso or great pyrenees. They don't head tilt nearly as much because such close communication is not what we have, through breeding, designed them to do.
- mbg721 5y ago
  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.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  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-evolution 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.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    Our evolution has also been altered by dogs. We may have evolved the trait so that we could better communicate with them. Or we mimic them, a cultural thing.
- frazbin 5y ago
  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.
callamdelaney 5y ago
It's to do with sounds, to better locate where they are coming from or to better hear a noise we're making. My puppy does it when I whistle at her or make some other noise she's not heard before.
treeman79 5y ago
https://youtu.be/xwI4r8TTpNw https://youtu.be/xwI4r8TTpNw https://youtu.be/lgLWRJCB5Lk https://youtu.be/lgLWRJCB5Lk There is a recent trend of saying your dogs favorite words while on the phone. Lots of head tilting in all these videos. Dogs are clearly interested/curious.
wellthisisgreat 5y ago
How many people I wonder had their internal dog tilt its head when reading this headline. I definitely had. And then again several times while reading the comments. Was kind of like yawning trigger / thinking of lemon - salivating trigger kind of experience.

196 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

My dog does this 100% of the time when I whisper the word treat. Probably has to do with sound.

> A quick internet search turned up plenty of speculative results positing that dogs tilt their heads to hear better, to listen for specific words or tones, or to see past their snouts. Sommese found one poster hypothesizing that shelter dogs do it more often because they know on some level that humans find it irresistible. Amusing to see this play out again in the comments here

vanderZwan 5y ago

> all border collies I assume the control group was also border collies? Otherwise they might have instead discovered that border collies tilt their heads more often (which would also be interesting of course).

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Hm. I've got a border collie sleeping at my feet right now (a calm BC is a rarity...). We have two of them. One (the male, younger) does the head tilt a lot, but the other (our female) does not. What I find interesting in terms of this article is that the latter, the female, is a lot smarter, more agile, more focused, and has more of the classic border collie attributes ("the eye", intense focus, etc.) but head tilts a lot less. Instead she stares and does a lot of... ear antennae action. Instead of tilting her head, her (erect) ears wiggle all over the place, like they're ... tuning in. So this seems to contradict the findings of the study here where they seem to associate the head tilt with intelligence, I've always interpreted head tilt as confusion. But of course that's just a single data point. Ah, border collies. Just wanna collect em all.

paganel 5y ago
> 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.
lsaferite 5y ago
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. :)
mrtranscendence 5y ago
I’m having a hard enough time training a golden retriever. Border collies scare me.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Border collies train you. They have the sweetest temperament, though. I was always a lab person until we got a rescue collie, and I just fell in love with them. They are pure intuition. And they just want to please you and have fun (which for them means working non-stop doing stuff). Their desire to please makes them pretty easy to train, it's just a matter of being consistent, which we are not. But they don't cause trouble in general once they know what displeases you because they really just want your approval so badly. In the hands of a more qualified trainer, our female would be an insanely talented agility or herding dog. So fast. So attentive. So sensitive.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    Interesting! I mostly only know border collies by reputation, which is probably unfair. The pleasing temperament is why we went with a golden retriever; my girlfriend wants to train her as a therapy dog. But training has been difficult, due in no small part to how inconsistent we've been (and how rambunctious the dog is). We also can't get her to entirely stop play biting, which is frustrating. I love her to bits and would do anything for her, but I don't think I'll ever get a puppy again.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

My pup does the tilt, back and forth, pretty much 90% of the time if I talk to her in a sustained sing-song voice. She definitely understands a lot of words, and it definitely seems like she’s focusing to pick out meaningful words she does know from whatever other nonsense I might be saying.

lamontcg 5y ago

Grew up with German Shepherds that all did this. I actually find it pretty obvious that its about cognition. When they tilt their heads I can just about hear their brain working to figure out what you mean + want. They've got excellent hearing and they don't really need to improve it, they're just thinking about whatever stimulus they're reacting to. And probably did evolve to communicate that thinking pose to humans. Its a little bit of an "I've almost got it, can I get another hint?" kind of pose.

mojomark 5y ago

Watch [1] @ 1:08. Is it really a mystery as to why canines tilt their heads when spoken to? It's always seemed self-evident that they are hearing a sound that is of interest and they are evaluating to see if it's useful information. 1. https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I

rsj_hn 5y ago
I do the same thing
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  ....Fido? How did you get online?
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    You'll never catch me! I'm going to play the piano next.
  - theaussiestew 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
- richardatlarge 5y ago
  Me too, and when I do, my dog does too
- pcurve 5y ago
  I chuckled at this... but it made me wonder if I also do it too. Not quite tilt, but squint, cock my head left and down.
ordu 5y ago
> 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.

bernardv 5y ago

Is it me, or do some researchers seem to start from a point of stark ignorance and thus a low bar for ‘findings’?

sydthrowaway 5y ago
Nothing wrong with fundamental research
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  Little S, science… Nice to see you my old friend, now out of the way, I need whole 2 data centers to test this model of the milky way that I’ll use to predict what global temperatures would be if Hitler won, the testing performed by a singularity itself on loan from MetaFacebook5000, good thing we were able to leverage the entire country of Luxembourg to fund this, along with NIH money (so long as we promised to kick a puppy).
beowulfey 5y ago
yes, this is how to avoid biases and assumptions from leading to incorrect conclusions

lostsock 5y ago

I thought this was already established? I learnt about it from Smarter Every Day: https://youtu.be/Oai7HUqncAA?t=388 https://youtu.be/Oai7HUqncAA?t=388 Here is the source they reference: https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/why-dogs-tilt-their-heads https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/why-dogs-tilt-their-h...

pcurve 5y ago
This article has different conclusion that the OP's article?
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  And it documents a different study that uses a different method. It's as if the articles were written about different things.
RRWagner 5y ago
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!
- asxd 5y ago
  It seems obvious in hindsight, but that's an interesting insight I hadn't thought of before. This got me curious about how we can roughly determine if a sound is coming from above or below us even without tilting our heads. A quick search led to this interesting but somewhat open-ended stackexchange answer: > Localization in the vertical plane (elevation) is less well investigated. As far as I know it is the shape of the outer ear (pinna) that transforms the frequency characteristic of incoming sound. In terms of directional hearing it is thought that sounds coming from above lead to a different head transfer function than sounds from below. This means that localization can only be accomplished when the sound has a particular familiar characteristic that is slightly disturbed in the frequency domain when encountered at different angles of elevation (Hofman & Van Opstal, 2003). [1] From this, it seems like the pinna is shaped in such a way that it filters audio differently depending on whether it came from above or below? Can anyone who has more experience with ears confirm or clarify this? [1] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/53207/how-we-can-localize-sound-vertically-up-down-and-front-to-back https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/53207/how-we-can...

klodolph 5y ago

Owls have “pre-tilted” ears… their heads are asymmetrical! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization_in_owls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization_in_owls

aasasd 5y ago

Afaik humans also rotate their heads a bit if sound comes from somewhere on the median plane, to get some inter-ear difference. And are not always aware of this behavior.

Buttons840 5y ago
Our ears twitch towards the direction of sound too. Mine do sometimes at least.

Procedural 5y ago

Wanna go for a walk?

ravenstine 5y ago
Ride in the car?
scollet 5y ago
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.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Our border collies know so many variants of "outside", "walk", "W-A-L-K" spelled out, "woods" (our back woods), "garden", etc. and N number of other words and are at the door before I even know that I'm going there, myself.
  - avisser 5y ago
    This hits home. I learned a new word when my mom started talking about "perambulation" around my Aussie to avoid premature excitement.
  - scollet 5y ago
    That's pretty amazing. We've adopted "treaties???" for rewarding our current dog and it works doubly to get her to distill that energy for a little bit.
- laichzeit0 5y ago
  I get “talks” but how does socks and locks trigger him?
  - wiredfool 5y ago
    Socks imply shoes. And shoes imply walkies.

codr7 5y ago

Who knows? I've found I tend to tilt my head when I'm trying to find a different angle mentally, alone and when interacting with other people.

math0ne 5y ago

So it means they are trying to understand, basically the same thing humans use it for.

sideshowb 5y ago

Dogs can look up?

Phenix88be 5y ago
Yes, and if it's needed, they can just sit and move their head to up to 90°.

Phenix88be 5y ago

I have been a dog trainer for about 16 years now and see this behaviour countless time. Most commonly on shepherd typed dog. But some hunting dog do it too. It's always linked to how focus the dog is something. It's also when you repeat multiple time the same command that you trigger this behaviour. Like they focus on it.

bradstewart 5y ago
Yep, my Spaniel seems to do it every time I say words she doesn't know/understand.
wombatmobile 5y ago
> It's always linked to how focus the dog is something Pardon you?
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  "It's always linked to how focus[ed] the dog is [or] something" what was I instinctively read...
  - bool3max 5y ago
    Same, I didn't even notice the mistake. Could also be interpreted as "how focused the dog is _on_ something".
    - Phenix88be 5y ago
      You got it right !

ra120271 5y ago

I would, with no real foundation, posit that it was somehow related to human eye movements when recalling memories https://neurosciencenews.com/eye-movement-memory-15857/ https://neurosciencenews.com/eye-movement-memory-15857/

hellbannedguy 5y ago

I think animals are much more intuitive than we think. I once had young veterinarian tell me my dog didn't feel anything when having a Grand Mal Seizure while at the foot of my bed. She said, "They just don't feel like we do." I was to tired to even talk. I do know when Chester, my 150 lb. American Bulldog/pit mix, had the seizure he looked into my eyes, and wrapped his paws around me. He was still shaking. I have never seen an animal so scared. He wouldn't leave my side for a few days. I have a bunch of other instances where I could sware he was human, with human emotions. I still remember listening to those philosophy professors saying man is vastly different than animals. I didn't believe it then, nor now.

xchip 5y ago

TL;DR: "The team thinks it could be linked to mental processing—a sign of high attentiveness or concentration"

acosmism 5y ago

interesting no one mentioned- cats do something similar!

Nihilartikel 5y ago
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.

aaron695 5y ago

The comments (and the article) are a mess. It because it's good to move ears for sound direction, which everyone knows because we are smart, but somehow this article shows it's done during mental cognition. So either state why this article is wrong or adapt the theory.

ramesh31 5y ago

Do wolves do it though? Seems far more likely that, like many other dog traits, this is something that was artificially selected by humans as being cute.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
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.
mhb 5y ago
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.

marhee 5y ago

Dogs tilt their head to better determine the vertical location of a sound. That's always been my hypothesis. Dogs have two ears, spaced horizontally apart such that triangulation can be used to determine the origin of the sound by exploiting the small time difference in time for the sound to reach both ears. But vertically speaking the ears are in the same position. So to be able to better judge the vertical position of the origin of the sound, they title their heads in order to place the ears apart on the vertical axis.

defgeneric 5y ago
That seems to accord with what the fox does at 1:08 here: https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I

wombatmobile 5y ago

I do this to. In my case, I do it after I have heard or seen something surprising or puzzling. I do it while I am processing the information. It's a way to signal to the person or people I am with that I am offline i.e. not receiving further input through my eyed and ears whilst I am processing the data.

bregma 5y ago

Dogs are about 99% oriented around scent. Perhaps changing the angle of their two nostrils allows for a more accurate 3-D perception of their world? Asked to fetch a named toy, the dog "reads" the room in olfactory stereo to locate the object for retrieval. It's not particularly good science to assume the universe is limited to what humans are good at perceiving. I'm sure there are some potential publications in this somewhere.

frazbin 5y ago
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
mbreese 5y ago
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.

slingnow 5y ago

This seems almost too obvious to study. Have you never tilted your head when you hear (or even just think about) a piece of interesting / surprising / confusing information? Now, I don't know why _humans_ tilt our heads, but it has always been clear to me with my dogs that they are doing the exact same thing. They're pausing to think a little harder in response to something new.

svachalek 5y ago
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.
GreenWatermelon 5y ago
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.

abbaselmas 5y ago

Maybe it is not all related with sound but vision! it must be related with inputs to brain but it cant be only sound. If you ever work with computer vision, rotating an image a little, lets say tilt, can vastly increase or decrease your algorithm's performance. For example: early face detection algorithms were looking for T zone in your face from eyebrows to nose. (cheeckbones are generally brighter areas) However, those old algorithms were very bad at if the image is 180 degree rotated (T zone is not T anymore). Dont have to be 180 45 degree is enough for most face detection algorithms. In neural nets, artificial intelligence practices like augmenting data, rotate the image a little and give the same image as an input data namely Augmenting data improves algorithm performance. In my opinion the dogs multiply the input by rotating or tilting their head so that autmatically augmenting data!!! So that they can detect better whatever they were looking before. Computer scientist keep inspiring from nature but maybe its time to explain some phenomena with computer science methods. Researcher force themselves to find a new thing in computer area, maybe they go beyond nature sometimes unintentionally.

retrac 5y ago
> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
- abbaselmas 5y ago
  > the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental, three-dimensional 'map' corresponding to the scene Your reference is very interesting for me because in computer vision we try to locate local features and try to match these local features, so that 3D correspondence can be extracted from multiple images which called structure from motion (SfM). Now I know, humans (and animals) also do the same thing!
frazbin 5y ago
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).

sandworm101 5y ago

Or maybe they to it because we think it is cute. The dog's evolution is totally tied to their interactions with humans. The head tilt is a form of communication, them telling us that they are doing a particular behavior. Those that head tilt would better communicate with people, resulting in better treatment, more breading opportunities and an evolutionary pressure towards more head tilting. These are border collies, a working dog designed to interact with a human handler. Take a look at something like a cane corso or great pyrenees. They don't head tilt nearly as much because such close communication is not what we have, through breeding, designed them to do.

mbg721 5y ago
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.
pessimizer 5y ago
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-evolution 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.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  Our evolution has also been altered by dogs. We may have evolved the trait so that we could better communicate with them. Or we mimic them, a cultural thing.
frazbin 5y ago
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.

callamdelaney 5y ago

It's to do with sounds, to better locate where they are coming from or to better hear a noise we're making. My puppy does it when I whistle at her or make some other noise she's not heard before.

treeman79 5y ago

https://youtu.be/xwI4r8TTpNw https://youtu.be/xwI4r8TTpNw https://youtu.be/lgLWRJCB5Lk https://youtu.be/lgLWRJCB5Lk There is a recent trend of saying your dogs favorite words while on the phone. Lots of head tilting in all these videos. Dogs are clearly interested/curious.

wellthisisgreat 5y ago

How many people I wonder had their internal dog tilt its head when reading this headline. I definitely had. And then again several times while reading the comments. Was kind of like yawning trigger / thinking of lemon - salivating trigger kind of experience.