Anyone who has a dog will tell you that among them there is a very deep understanding, a bond that makes the words useless – “We understand each other with a look” And similar statements. We do not want to accuse anyone to lie, of course, but if you have said this sentence at least once in your life you know that there is the possibility that you can get rid of it: a new study published in the magazine Anthrozoös suggests that, When it comes to understanding dogs, we humans are wrong than we believebecause we tend to give too much importance to the context and too little to the actual animal’s body language.
Aid from Zoom. The study was born from an intuition that the first author, Holly Molinaro, had in 2021, in the middle of Lockdown from Pandemia: the restrictions imposed by the situation were preventing her from working on her doctoral thesis, based right on Canine emotions. The intuition came during a call on zoom, which as you know offers the possibility of blurring the background and keeping only the person who is speaking in the foreground.
Molinaro wondered if it was possible to use the same effect on the videos of dogs that react to different stimuli, so as to be able to show a sample of human beings their decontextualized behavior – and find out if the absence of a context influence Our perception of dog body language. The videos were produced with a single protagonist, Oliver, Molinaro’s family dog, who was filmed while reacing a series of STIMULES both positive (a toy, a little food) and negative (a heated aspirata on, or the home cat).
We don’t understand dogs? Humans were at that point subjected to the vision of these “purified” videos of the context, and they were asked to interpret emotions who was expressing Oliver. The results were disastrous for humans, who without knowing what the dog was reacting They almost always made a mistake to interpret their body language.
Still worse they did when they were faced with “hybrid” videos: on the one hand a positive stimulus, on the other the dog’s reactions to a negative stimulus. In these cases, humans made everything wrong, focusing only on the stimulus and using it to deduce the emotion experienced by the dog at that moment.
The study has its limits, first of all the fact that it was made using videos of a single dog, but the results are suggestive: We tend to evaluate the emotions of our dogs above all based on the context and on logical deductionsand we are therefore less good than expected a Read their true body language.
