Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here. If you're like me, you love dogs, possibly more than people. Some days, their warm eyes and doggie grins have me wrapped around their fluffy pupper tails, and according to new research from the University of Portsmouth's Dog Cognition Center, dogs deliberately make more facial expressions when we're watching them, and it could be their way to
communicate with us. The study was led by Dr Julienne Kaminsky and published in a twenty seventeen issue of Scientific Reports. Kaminski and her research team came to their conclusion after watching twenty four different dogs, all family pets of varying breeds and ages. Each dog was filmed individually in a room with a person who went through various scenarios, including looking at the dog, looking away from the dog, and
giving the dog food. The scientists then studied the dog's facial expressions using the Dog Facial Action Coding System or Dog FACTS, which is a scientific tool for coding canines facial movements. It was adapted from the FACTS system created for humans back in night. Kaminsky and her team discovered that each dog made animated faces when the person in the room was looking at it, including raising its eyebrows and sticking out its tongue a much more than when
the person's back was turned. In a press statement, Dr Kaminsky said the findings appear to support evidence that dogs are sensitive to humans attention and that expressions are potentially active attempts to communicate, not simple emotional displays. Most surprisingly is that even the presence of food didn't influence the dogs as much as human affection. Kaminski said, we knew domestic dogs paid attention to how attentive a human is.
In a previous study, we found, for example, the dogs stole food more often when the human's eyes were closed or when they had their back turned. In another study, we found dogs follow the gaze of a human if the human first establishes eye contact with the dog, so the dog knows that the gaze shift is erected at them. Kabinski says it's possible that the expressions of dogs have changed as they've become more domesticated, but the study does
have its limits. Twenty four canines makes for a small study sample, so it's likely that more dogs should be studied to confirm these findings, which sounds like an excellent research session to me. Today's episode was written by Sarah Glime and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other tail wagging topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com