Dogs spend a silly amount of time watching everything we do. They watch us open the fridge, close the fridge, go back to the fridge 20 minutes later, put on shoes, take off shoes, and wander around doing a thousand little human things that would be painfully boring to another human. New research suggests they’re paying attention to something as tiny as a blink, too.
A study published in Royal Society Open Science found that dogs changed how much they blinked depending on who they were watching. Researchers at the University of Parma recruited 38 dogs, even though only 35 finished. Three got too distracted by the unfamiliar setting, which is very “dog” of them.
The experiment was pretty low-key. Dogs watched clips of their owner, an unfamiliar woman, and an unfamiliar man. Sometimes the person blinked every three seconds. Sometimes they just stared into the camera. Researchers watched the dogs for 40 seconds and counted their blinks.
Your Dog May Be More Tuned Into Your Face Than You Think
The dogs blinked more while watching blinking humans, but the biggest response came when the face belonged to their owner. That same increase didn’t happen with strangers, suggesting dogs were paying attention to the person as much as the actual movement. Dogs also blinked more while watching female owners, although researchers were careful with that result because caregiving history and other factors could have influenced it.
Study co-author Eleanora Biffi told ScienceAlert that blinking is “an ancient, automatic physiological behavior that did not originally evolve as a social signal.” She said it could still offer clues about “attention, engagement, or affiliation.”
Before anyone spends the rest of the night blinking at their dog like a lunatic, the researchers aren’t saying dogs are sending messages on command. They checked whether dogs blinked within 1.5 seconds of a human blink, and 57.3% did. That wasn’t statistically different from chance. So yes, the dogs were blinking more. No, they were not having a tiny eyelid conversation.
The experiment also used prerecorded videos, so researchers still want to see what happens face-to-face. For now, the interesting bit is how closely dogs seem to watch the people they know and love.
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