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.
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.
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.
In evolution things usually persist for multiple reasons. It seems possible that the gesture is both functional (in terms of the dog's hearing) and attractive (to humans). An attempt to perceive correctly and a signal of openness and willingness to do so.
Sure. I just think it would be more interesting to know why the authors of the study, who have probably invested much more time thinking about this than any of the commenters here, concluded that that explanation was not satisfactory.
Maybe because they had already decided to stick a particular bread of dog. Border collies are far from representative of the species. They are built for a very particular task, one that is far from universal. There are many things for which they are not suited.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
My dog is blind and does the head tilt when she hears certain noises (e.g. dogs barking). She was not born blind though, in case that could make a difference.
> 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
> 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!
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!
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?
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.
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.
> 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 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 the dog in the article is doing the behavior after the sound is finished. There is nothing more to hear.
The dog is clearly processing the noun and preparing to go search for the objective and retrieve it.
I oftentimes also straining my ears after the sound have finished. It is hard to strain them before the sound, it is possible only if you anticipate the sound.
When dog needs to think it may tilt its head, but it wouldn't help to think. We might try to devise a hypothesis that it shakes blood with oxygen and glucuse rendering them more accessible to neurons, but I wouldn't buy it.
It is either a late attempt to catch the sound in its fullness, or it is a some kind of a signal to others. Or both.
My guess that it is a fixed action pattern of canines allowing them to locate a source of a sound, but it was repurposed by interactions with humans as a signal, that may be read as "Did I hear a learned noun?" With the following "Yeah, I see your expectant look, it seems I heard. Ok! I'm on it!".
It gives an idea of another experiment. To teach dogs to get visual commands, like given by gestures, pictures, or anything else they could digest. And to see would they tilt their heads receiving such commands. If they wouldn't then the tilting is nothing more than their way to respond to an important sound. I didn't tried it, but judging by my experience of interacting with dogs, they wouldn't tilt their head, if the situation doesn't involve sound processing.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
Puppies are soooo much work. And there's so many mature dogs that need rehoming, so why bother.
But having had dogs that we've raised from puppy and ones that we've adopted, I find that the puppy-raised ones were more emotionally attached.
Labs are notorious chewers, and they have a long adolescence (3 years!). And then the chewing usually stops. They're people lovers and snuggly and have lower energy, so I can see them being great therapy dogs, just might take a bit.
When we had a dog that chewed more we got her deer or elk antlers from the pet store and she chewed those to smithereens. Kept her busy and prevented her from going after our things.
> Puppies are soooo much work. And there's so many mature dogs that need rehoming, so why bother.
I definitely feel bad about that. Our last dog was a rescued golden retriever who passed away around the start of the year, and we had our hearts set on another golden. We felt uncomfortable enough with purchasing a dog that we donated the same amount spread out to a few animal rescues, but I still feel a bit guilty.
But we got our last dog when she would’ve been about 5 (she was a stray! How was the sweetest golden in the world a stray!), so we skipped all the puppy and adolescence. We underestimated the puppy stuff.
Antlers are a good idea. We were doing pressed rawhide but she started choking on them for some reason.
The puppy stuff is a challenge but worth it because they get so heavily bonded with you. They really integrate into the family so strongly when you have them from little. My experience anyways.
Our previous collie was a rescue, and she died young (like 6 years old, poor thing) and we were so heartbroken my wife went out and got a puppy about two weeks later.
We also had mixed experiences with rescues. They can be hard to deal with and in general most wouldn't even talk to use because we live on a farm without a "fenced backyard" (you try fencing 6 acres)... Except it's actually heaven here for a dog and we are good at taking care of them.
Ha, this sounds exactly like our Springer Spaniel. She is highly focused, extremely agile, never really misbehaves, but absolutely looses her marbles if there are squirrels in the yard and she is inside.
It's like she views her entire purpose as eradicating the yard of squirrels. But if I put her outside while I'm working, she comes back immediately to the door and waits for me to watch her chase the squirrels.
She also does the head tilt nearly every time I talk to her.
Had an Aussie. Just wanted to add that, in my experience, causing trouble was inversely related to how much exercise the dog had. If you take 'em out and throw the frisbee every morning (walking is insufficient), you'll have a well-enough behaved herder.
Yeah our male BC was an adoption and I feel like he behaves more like an Aussie than a BC -- e.g. nips and barks at animals instead of the BC stare which is apparently a key difference in their herding behaviour -- and does the same for people. If he's really happy to see you? ... He'll nip a hole in your shirt. Something the female BC has never done.
But he's easier to wear out than her. Frisbee for a half hour and he's done. She's impossible to wear out. And thus you can see why they'd be invaluable on a sheep farm...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hence the joke book I heard of as a kid: "101 ways to wok your dog". Tock and talk are pronounced the same, as is wok (the cooking instrument) and walk.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.