Dog owners are intimately familiar with the endearing head tilt. You might ask your furry companion a simple question like, “Want to go for a walk?” and be met with that quizzical, head-cocked posture. It’s a common and captivating behavior in dogs, but the reasons behind why dogs tilt their heads have remained largely mysterious. While this cute canine quirk is widely observed, scientific research into the specific causes is surprisingly limited, with only a single study delving deeply into the potential explanations. This groundbreaking research suggests that dogs may tilt their heads as a way to process familiar words and access associated memories.
Andrea Sommese, an animal cognition researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and the lead author of the aforementioned study, draws parallels to human behavior. “In humans, when you’re trying to recall a memory or visualize something, you might tilt your head slightly,” Sommese explains. “This action seems to aid in accessing that mental image. It’s plausible that dogs exhibit head tilting for similar cognitive reasons.”
While cognitive processing appears to be a significant factor, head tilting in animals, including dogs, can also be related to sensory perception. Many species tilt their heads to better orient themselves to sights, sounds, and smells. This often involves favoring one ear or nostril to gather more information.
Julia Meyers-Manor, an animal cognition researcher at Ripon College, who wasn’t involved in Sommese’s research, highlights the role of sound localization. “Humans, birds, dogs – many different species tilt their heads because it’s a mechanism to improve sound localization,” Meyers-Manor notes. “Tilting the head alters the angle at which sound waves reach each ear, creating a slight timing difference that helps the brain pinpoint the sound’s origin more accurately.”
Barn owls offer an extreme example of head-tilting prowess. They can swivel their necks an astounding 270 degrees. This remarkable adaptation, as highlighted in a 2017 study published in the Journal of Anatomy, assists their largely immobile eyes in focusing on prey. Moreover, it allows them to point their highly sensitive ears in almost any direction, maximizing auditory information gathering.
However, the head tilting observed in dogs, particularly in response to verbal cues, appears to transcend basic sensory input. Sommese and his team’s research focused on a group of “gifted” dogs – canines with an exceptional ability to learn and remember the names of numerous toys. These gifted dogs were compared to typical dogs who could not be trained to learn toy names. The findings were striking: gifted dogs tilted their heads 43% of the time when their owners spoke the name of one of their known toys. In contrast, typical dogs exhibited head tilting only 2% of the time in the same scenario.
The consistent direction of the head tilt in gifted dogs, regardless of the owner’s position, further suggests that this behavior is not primarily about sound localization in this context. Instead, it points towards a process of auditory information processing linked to memory recall and mental imagery. “Typical dogs might not exhibit the same head-tilting response to toy names because they don’t typically associate specific names with individual toys, hindering memory recall,” Sommese suggests. However, he adds that typical dogs might still tilt their heads in response to other relevant cues, such as the promise of a treat or an upcoming walk, stimuli that do trigger associations and anticipation.
Published in the journal Animal Cognition in 2021, Sommese’s research opens exciting avenues for further exploration into canine cognition and head tilting. One intriguing aspect is the potential link to brain lateralization – the concept that different brain hemispheres specialize in processing specific types of information. In humans, language processing is predominantly located in the left hemisphere. While a 2016 Science study indicates that dogs process familiar human words in the right hemisphere of their brains, the principle of lateralized processing could still apply to head tilting.
Meyers-Manor proposes an additional layer to the head-tilt phenomenon: social signaling. Over time, head tilting could have evolved into a social cue, communicating attentiveness and engagement. This social dimension might explain why humans instinctively interpret the dog head tilt as a sign of adorable curiosity, further strengthening the human-animal bond. The endearing nature of the head tilt might be rooted in our perception of it as a visual signal of a dog’s active engagement and interest in us.
