What is Your Dog Telling You?

Have you ever had the feeling that you very clearly understand what your dog was telling you? What about your dog understanding you? It may very well be that you and your dog are in fact communicating effectively.

Dr. Miklosi has done extensive research on dog communication and has come to hypothesize that dogs may be able to understand human communication well as a result of the long domestication history of dogs. Watch the video below to learn a bit of Dr. Miklosi’s research:

Looking into Dr. Miklosi’s research, one can find that he has long been researching dog and human communication. In 2003, Miklosi began to question why dogs and humans may be able to communicate. He found that it may be that dogs are able to understand human communication because they are able to look to human faces when needing help (Miklosi et al., 2003). Miklosi and his team compared dogs’ ability to look at human faces when needing help to wolves. It appears to be that wolves do not do this while dogs do. This then led him to investigate further why dogs and wolves, who are close relatives, do different things with humans.

Similar to this, in 2009, Topál, Gergely, Erdőhegyi, Csibra, and Miklosi found that compared to wolves, dogs make errors that human babies also make. When babies see something hidden in one place (Place A) and then hidden in a different place (Place B), they continue to look for the item in Place A as a result of some human communication. Dogs, this study shows, do the same persistent search in the clearly wrong Place A (2009). Once again, wolves do not make this mistake.

All of this research has led Miklosi and other researchers to hypothesize that the reason for such differences between dogs and wolves, as well as the large understand of human communication is that this is a simple adaptation of dogs to their lives with humans (Miklósi, Topál, & Csányi, 2004).

Although it would be great to think that humans and dogs have begun to in some way communicate, we must be careful and clearly investigate if this communication is truly happening. In order to do this, more research is needed.

Nonetheless, for some reason dogs are known as man’s best friend. This apparent interspecific communication may be just one of the reasons for this title.

References

Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi, E., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Virányi, Z., & Csányi, V. (2003). A simple reason

for a big difference: Wolves do not look back at humans, but dogs do. Current Biology, 13(9), 763-766. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0960-9822(03)00263-X

Miklósi, Á., Topál, J., & Csányi, V. (2004). Comparative social cognition: What can dogs teach

us? Animal Behaviour, 67, 995-1004.

Topál, J., Gergely, G., Erdőhegyi, Á., Csibra, G., & Miklosi, A. (2009). Differential sensitivity to

human communication in dogs, wolves, and human infants. Science, 325, 1269-1272.