Dogs are humanity’s best animal friend. But when it comes to the science of dogs, we’ve been shortchanging our four-legged buddies, says Federico Rossano. A cognitive researcher at the University of California, San Diego, Rossano studies social cognition and communication in dogs—but for years, the field has focused on owners, not their canine companions.
It’s a literal “pet peeve,” he says.
That’s starting to change, however. Evidence is mounting that dogs have complex inner lives—and that they are much smarter than we thought.
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“Compared to other animal species, dogs are significantly better at understanding human communication,” Rossano says. “There’s a lot of beautiful research pointing that dogs understand humans pretty well.”
Many older dog studies surveyed owners, meaning their evidence was subjective, or involved tests of how well dogs understood human commands. As a result, for years, scientists didn’t know much about dogs’ emotions or what goes on in their brains. Thanks to new techniques and increased attention from the research community, that’s starting to change.
Rossano is interested in how dogs feel about their world. After being sent a video of dogs communicating through soundboards, Rossano started a community science experiment that spanned six continents and 10,000 dogs. His team recorded dogs at home using buttons that “spoke” words for the animals and found that, for most of them, choosing to use the buttons was far from random—they had a purpose. Some dogs could even use more than 100 buttons and effectively carry a conversation.
“In general, revealing anything about intelligence usually makes you reconsider who you’re dealing with and possibly appreciate that there’s more to this creature living with you than you thought,” Rossano says.
In a study published last month, a different team of scientists found dogs not only blink more when they see other dogs do so but also blink in response to blinking from their owners—and sometimes strangers. This kind of “reciprocal” blinking may improve social bonds, the researchers theorize.
Studying these more subtle reactions can help build a more nuanced understanding of dogs’ perception of the world than just barking or tail-wagging, says Chiara Canori, lead author of the blinking study and a neuroscience Ph.D. candidate at University of Parma in Italy.
“Among facial expressions, there are many ways that dog use to communicate or just let us know something about their emotional state,” she says. Now she wants to investigate more to see how dogs respond to other subtle emotional cues.
These subtler processing hints will add to a body of research showing that dogs do, to an extent, understand what we’re doing or saying. Past research has shown that dogs can distinguish between words, male and female voices, other barks and even different languages. And what about that cute head tilt dogs do when you’re talking to them? It’s just another sign they’re processing human language.
Scientists also now understand that dogs tend to be natural cooperators, a trait that traces all the way back to their wolf ancestors, and that they tend to prefer their owners over other humans, Canori says. Other research shows that dogs can show an unique attentiveness to human emotion: a study earlier this summer hooked dogs up to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and found their brains responded to images of happy human faces differently from sad ones.
Understanding that dogs have a high emotional intelligence may seem obvious to owners, but this field of science isn’t that old—just a few decades. And the use of tools such as MRI scanners on dogs is even newer.
Rossano believes these studies might help us answer more metacognitive questions: Do dogs know what they don’t know, can they tell time, and do they register events around them even if they don’t react? These tests may be particularly useful when looking at brain activity in dogs’ natural environment, Rossano says.
Better understanding of what dogs are thinking could help us better care for them—but it would also just be nice to know, he says.
“Dogs have been our companions for 15,000 years,” he says. “Half the population has dogs in their homes. Don’t you want to know what your roommate thinks?”