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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.

1. https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I

I do the same thing
I chuckled at this... but it made me wonder if I also do it too. Not quite tilt, but squint, cock my head left and down.
> 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.

Is it me, or do some researchers seem to start from a point of stark ignorance and thus a low bar for ‘findings’?
Nothing wrong with fundamental research
Little S, science…

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).

yes, this is how to avoid biases and assumptions from leading to incorrect conclusions
I thought this was already established? I learnt about it from Smarter Every Day: https://youtu.be/Oai7HUqncAA?t=388

Here is the source they reference: https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/why-dogs-tilt-their-h...

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?

[1] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/53207/how-we-can...

I have ears and can confirm that they're very vertically asymmetric.
This article has different conclusion that the OP's article?
And it documents a different study that uses a different method.

It's as if the articles were written about different things.

Smarter Every Day is wrong.

If you have kids get them to do the trig for you.

Your brain can't tell the difference because of the speed of sound and ear position vertically. It's too quick.

I don't see how the brain could ever use Interaural time difference. I think it's fake science.

I might be convinced horizontally, but I think it's bullshit. At maximum on a human (a dog is smaller) ~20cm that's .0005 seconds maximum time difference. Exactly 180 degrees (Get your kids to explain the numbers) You need faster than that to get different angles.

It's about ear shape and maybe the sound going through your head so you get a muffle on different angles or something, Google it.

Dogs with tilted heads are also clearly cute (and studies back this) so we also will clearly breed dogs that tilt heads more. There can be more than one reason a dog tilts their head. We have designed them for a few different purposes and it's efficient to reuse their code.

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.
Our ears twitch towards the direction of sound too. Mine do sometimes at least.
Wanna go for a walk?
This was always interesting to me because I had a dog that only recognized the "alk" part.

You can imagine the disappoint when talking about socks, talks, locks.

I get “talks” but how does socks and locks trigger him?
In my accent, walk/talk/sock/lock all sound similar.
They rhyme in most American English dialects.
Can you post a video of someone pronouncing that? I have a hard time imaging how sock and talk can rhyme.
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.
Is this really true in most American accents? In my midwestern accent “tock” and “talk” absolutely don’t rhyme, but maybe I’m the outlier here.
in the northwest (Vancouver, BC area) tock and talk rhyme (they are pretty much homonyms).
I'm curious how you pronounce locks and if you don't mind where you are from.
Socks imply shoes. And shoes imply walkies.
Yep, my dogs are tuned into sock acquisition as a precursor to outside. Which says a lot about how COVID WFH has trended towards the sockless.
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.
This hits home. I learned a new word when my mom started talking about "perambulation" around my Aussie to avoid premature excitement.
That's pretty amazing.

We've adopted "treaties???" for rewarding our current dog and it works doubly to get her to distill that energy for a little bit.

Who knows?

I've found I tend to tilt my head when I'm trying to find a different angle mentally, alone and when interacting with other people.

So it means they are trying to understand, basically the same thing humans use it for.
Dogs can look up?
Yes, and if it's needed, they can just sit and move their head to up to 90°.
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.

> It's always linked to how focus the dog is something

Pardon you?

"It's always linked to how focus[ed] the dog is [or] something"

what was I instinctively read...

Same, I didn't even notice the mistake. Could also be interpreted as "how focused the dog is _on_ something".
Yep, my Spaniel seems to do it every time I say words she doesn't know/understand.
I think animals are much more intuitive than we think.

I once had young veterinarian tell me my dog didn't feel anything when having a Grand Mal Seizure while at the foot of my bed.

She said, "They just don't feel like we do."

I was to tired to even talk.

I do know when Chester, my 150 lb. American Bulldog/pit mix, had the seizure he looked into my eyes, and wrapped his paws around me. He was still shaking. I have never seen an animal so scared.

He wouldn't leave my side for a few days.

I have a bunch of other instances where I could sware he was human, with human emotions.

I still remember listening to those philosophy professors saying man is vastly different than animals. I didn't believe it then, nor now.

TL;DR: "The team thinks it could be linked to mental processing—a sign of high attentiveness or concentration"
interesting no one mentioned- cats do something similar!
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.
The comments (and the article) are a mess.

It because it's good to move ears for sound direction, which everyone knows because we are smart, but somehow this article shows it's done during mental cognition.

So either state why this article is wrong or adapt the theory.

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.
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.

I do this to.

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.

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.

Depends on the breed, more than you would think! Some dogs really go more by sight-- shepherds and sight hounds being good examples.

Source: had a beagle and an aussie

This seems almost too obvious to study.

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.
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.

It’s interesting some poker players before making a ridiculous bluff will look up and to the right.
> It’s interesting some poker players before making a ridiculous bluff will look up and to the right.

It's a common tell for lying in general, not just bluffing in poker.

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).
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.

The article mentions that explanation and, presumably, they found it uncompelling.
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.

Steven Pinker on the evolution of the shrug:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPN2717RMLY#t=30s

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.
Maybe the explanation is that they wanted to use their favorite doggy. Or maybe humility counsels looking deeper for flaws in the experiment.
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.

It's a very good explanation because we think that's why domesticated dogs developed expressive brows: https://www.inverse.com/article/56744-dog-eyebrow-expression...

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.
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.

We feed a lot of strays and call them by whistle but whenever there's a new dog they always tilt their head.

It seems more likely they do it for concentrating during memory recall

> Or maybe they to it because we think it is cute

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?

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.
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.