{"id":375901,"date":"2026-09-06T02:56:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T02:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/?p=375901"},"modified":"2026-09-06T02:56:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T02:56:04","slug":"dogs-wink-more-when-watching-clips-of-their-owners-instead-of-those-of-strangers-research-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/?p=375901","title":{"rendered":"Dogs Wink More When Watching Clips of Their Owners Instead of Those of Strangers, Research Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Investigators at the University of Parma’s canine behavior laboratory enlisted 38 dogs for a study featured in Royal Society Open Science<\/a>. Each dog was positioned on a loose leash in a three by four metre room and was shown a forty-second film featuring three individuals looking directly at the camera.<\/p>\n

Out of the three faces, two were strangers. The third was the dog’s own owner, who was filmed in the laboratory after a five-minute acclimatization period, seated next to the projector with instructions to ignore the dog. The owners were kept unaware of what the experimenters were measuring.<\/p>\n

They were measuring blinks.<\/p>\n

The methodology<\/h2>\n

Every dog viewed two different versions of the film, with the order balanced throughout the sample, and a five-minute intermission between them. In the BLINK version, each individual blinked four times, once every three seconds, during their twelve seconds of screen time. In the CONTROL version, the same individual maintained a still, neutral expression for the same twelve seconds.<\/p>\n

The blinks were authentic. Instead of prompting anyone to blink on cue, the experimenter captured roughly two minutes of natural footage of each owner’s face, then extracted individual spontaneous blinks and arranged them into a rhythm. The unfamiliar actors were recorded and processed similarly. A green cone appeared with a beep at the start of the film, between each face, and at the conclusion, to redirect the dog’s attention to the screen.<\/p>\n

A total of four unfamiliar actors were utilized, organized into two fixed pairs consisting of one man and one woman, ensuring that no outcome relied on a single unfamiliar face. Each dog encountered the same pair in both conditions, and the pair assigned to each dog did not significantly alter their behavior. Twelve combinations accounted for every sequence of individual and every sequence of condition.<\/p>\n

Coding was conducted using two GoPro cameras, one positioned in front of the dog and one to the side to capture the eyes of dark-coated animals, employing the Dog Facial Action Coding System. Two certified coders assessed the footage, while a coder unaware of the condition reassessed one-fifth of it, with correlations between 0.70 and 0.92, indicating agreement.<\/p>\n

The blink measurements<\/h2>\n

Three dogs did not meet the inclusion criteria. The criteria were straightforward: they needed to face the screen with their eyes open for at least four seconds in both conditions, sufficient time to have observed one blink. This left 35 for analysis, the same number the paper’s abstract refers to regarding the dogs exposed to the videos.<\/p>\n

When averaged across all three individuals, the dogs exhibited a higher blink rate while watching the blinking faces compared to the still ones. The model that incorporated the condition outperformed the null model, and the effect was significant.<\/p>\n

Subsequently, the researchers segmented the results by who appeared on screen, and the findings shifted. The difference between the blinking and still versions was notable when the face belonged to the dog’s owner, particularly for female owners (p = 0.004) and more marginally for male owners (p = 0.046). For the two strangers, there was no significant difference whatsoever.<\/p>\n

However, when comparing individuals within the blinking films, only the female owners stood apart from the strangers. Dogs blinked more at female owners than at either stranger. Male owners did not show a significant difference from either stranger, and there was no significant difference between female and male owners. Owner sex also served as a between-dogs variable: 20 of the 38 dogs had female owners and 18 had male owners, which after excluding three left 19 and 16 for analysis, with no dog observing both.<\/p>\n

The paper\u2019s abstract concisely reports higher blink rates towards owners compared to unfamiliar humans, then adds the result concerning female owners in the following sentence. The figures presented above follow the results section, where male owners did not distinguish themselves from the strangers.<\/p>\n

Thus, the key takeaway is not that dogs generally blink back at people. It is that the effect of the blink video manifested for the dogs’ owners, and the only individual who differed from a stranger in direct comparison was a female owner.<\/p>\n

The prediction the study could not verify<\/h2>\n

The third of the three predictions in the study was more precise than a rate. If blinking serves as a genuine form of social coordination, dogs should have synchronized their blinks with those of the humans, and most closely with their owner\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Not in measurable terms. Across 96 dog blinks…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Investigators at the University of Parma’s canine behavior laboratory enlisted 38 dogs for a study featured in Royal Society Open Science. Each dog was positioned on a loose leash in a three by four metre room and was shown a forty-second film featuring three individuals looking directly at the camera. Out of the three faces, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":375902,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[179],"class_list":["post-375901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-source-scienceblog-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=375901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/375902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=375901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=375901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=375901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}