Your Dog Doesn't Recognize Your Face

[Turkeytop]

Dogs can read your expression, but they aren't super excited about your face: study

Researchers finds dogs' brains don't respond any differently to faces than to the backs of heads

Dogs aren't biologically attuned to faces in the same way that humans are — but they work hard to read our expressions anyway, according to a new study.

Researchers in Hungary found that dogs simply aren't wired to respond to faces. When shown pictures or videos of faces, their brains simply don't light up the way a human brain does.

In fact, to a dog's brain, it makes no difference whether they're looking us dead in the eyes or at the back of our heads.

"I wouldn't say that dogs [are] not interested in our face," the study's lead author Attila Andics told As It Happens host Carol Off. "What we say is just that they don't respond to faces stronger than to other kinds of stimuli."

The study was published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Dogs' brains respond most to other dogs

Andics, who studies adapted animal behaviour at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, says this study is one of the first to make a direct comparison between human and dog brain imaging.

The researchers put 30 humans and 20 dogs into MRI machines and showed them a series of images and videos depicting human faces, the backs of human heads, dog faces, and the backs of dog heads.

The dogs in the study were all longtime family pets who were trained with positive reinforcement to sit still in the MRI machines, Andics assured.

They found that humans' brains were more active when they were shown a face, as opposed to the back of a head, whether it belonged to a dog or a human. Dogs, on the other hand, showed no difference in brain activity.

The findings make perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint, Andics said.

"Dogs normally typically use many other bodily signals, not only the facial signals. A normal dog-to-dog communication contains many other things like the tail [or] the body posture," he said.

"But for humans, the faces are really central to visual communication."

One thing dogs and humans did have common was a natural response to seeing other members of their own species. Human brains were more active upon seeing people, while dogs brains' responded more to other dogs.

Still, Andics says there's ample evidence that dogs do recognize and respond to human facial expressions, and can tell different people's faces apart.

So dog owners should not be disappointed to learn their beloved pooches aren't naturally attuned to their faces, he said.

"Actually, I think that this research shows that dogs are really cool, because even though they don't have specialized neural machinery to process faces, they are still very good at doing this," he said.

"And this means that they have to learn much more, they have to work much more for this to excel at eye contact, to excel at following our gaze, to excel at reading emotions and recognizing the owner."

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as ... -1.5752649

[Bryce]

Hell, they could have given me a hundred bucks and I could have saved them a lot of time and trouble and told them so.

[bmw]

In other news, your cat isn't interested in you at all.

[Rate This]

In other news, your cat isn't interested in you at all.

Unless it wants attention or food...

[Honeyman]

I disagree completely. Sunday my wife was unboxing all the Halloween decorations and came across a full face mask. She put it on and walked toward the dog who was completely perplexed. There was no way she did not know something was very different facially.

[Turkeytop]

Our neighbour has a six month old Border Collie and we love her. whenever she sees me, she gets down on her belly and creeps toward me. (the dog, not the neighbour.)

She may not recognize my face, but she recognizes my car. I was driving the other day, in our neighbourhood, but on a different street. She happened to be walking her dog on that street, coming toward me. When I was still about 200 yards away, the dog spotted my vehicle. She went down on her belly and started moving in my direction, with her tail wagging.

[craig11152]

My dog will lick my face as much as I let her but has never licked the back of my head.

[MotorCityRadioFreak]

Dogs do know faces.

[Bryce]

Dog's do not know faces, at least in the way we think about knowing faces. Your dog knows you, but there are a whole bunch of different things that go into knowing you than your face.

[Turkeytop]

I remember once, with a dog we had, he apparently didn't recognize me at all. I had just come home and going up the walk toward the house. The wind must have been blowing in a direction that he couldn't get my scent.

He started barking at me. The closer I got, the more he barked and he kept backing up until he was right against the door.

I made one final jump onto the door step and he pissed himself right on the front porch.

I believe dogs do feel embarrassment. After he realized it was me, he put his head down and his tail down and slunk off into the yard.