BrainStuff Classics: Why Do Dogs Tilt Their Heads?

really knows for sure. That's right. Humanity 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 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. 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 aphelic babies like pugs, for instance, would never tilt over On psychology Today, dog behavior writer Dr Stanley Coryne shared the results of his

informal survey of five eighty two dog owners. Of those, seventy one of people who owned longer face pops said their dogs frequently tilt their heads when spoken to. In comparison, just 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 as humans. We hear sound waves that occur in the range of about twenty to twenty thod 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. Dogs cope with all that audio information partially by moving around their pina,

their fuzzy, scritch able outer ears. So some canines, especially those with floppy pina covering the front of their ear openings, may tilt their heads to move their pina and hone in on the sounds you're making. Furthermore, dogs have muscles that let them better process sounds in their 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 on a sound, or, as Stephen R. Lindsay says in his Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior in 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 years of training experience, socially apprehensive dogs don't tilt as much, but as with all studies into animal behavior, this say ecology 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 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. Today's episode was produced by Tyler Clang and written by me for the erstwhile brain Stuff YouTube series. Brain Stuff has merch now you can get phone cases, tote bags, and of course

t shirts. Every purchase helps keep the show going and supports us directly. You can find all that stuff at t public dot com slash brain stuff. For more on this and lots of other heck and adorable topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. M HM