Dogs can tell when you want to give them a treat – even if you don’t

Pet dogs respond more patiently when humans drop treats clumsily out of reach than when humans deliberately pull them away. This suggests that dogs can understand human intentions.

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Dogs can understand that humans have good intentions even when they don’t get what they want. Prior to this study, the ability to discriminate between humans unwilling or unable to perform a task was found only in nonhuman primates.

Although the close social bond between humans and dogs is well established, researchers have limited understanding of whether and how dogs understand human intentions. No. To see if pet dogs can distinguish between intentional and accidental actions by strangers, Christoph Völter and his colleagues at the Vienna Veterinary University in Austria used eight cameras. It was used to track the animal’s body movements while being tested by humans providing dog food.

Each dog and human were separated by a clear plastic panel with a hole through which a slice of sausage could pass. In 96 trials involving 48 pet dogs, human participants teased the dogs by lifting treats and pulling them back, or clumsily dropping sausages onto their side of the panel before the dogs ate them. I pretended

On all trials, dogs had to wait 30 seconds before finally getting the reward. Meanwhile, the team tracked the dog’s reactions. A machine learning algorithm trained to detect and track specific points on a dog’s body allows researchers to analyze the dog’s body language.

They found that the dogs responded more patiently when the treat was faked down compared to when the human intentionally pulled the treat away. Dogs made more eye contact with the experimenter, wagged their tails more, and stayed closer to the clear barrier. Still hoping for a treat. Teased dogs sat, laid down, and left the barrier more often. The results were similar across breeds, ages and genders.

In the clumsy test, dogs also wagged their tails more to the right, a behavior known to be associated with happy, relaxed dogs. “They have more positive feelings towards the clumsy experimenter, which suggests they actually understand that the experimenter is willing to feed them, but is too clumsy.” there could be,” he says Völter.