We are very fond of our dogs, if we have one
running our household. That means that we are well tuned into their social
interaction with other dogs, and sometimes that’s essential if we are going to
avoid large veterinary surgeon's bills. Maybe though, if we don’t own dogs, we
don’t notice when the initial sniffing and tail wag is turning into play or
quarrel.
It
goes without saying that as we recline on a park bench and see humans
interacting we can read the body language and tell a great deal about the
social interaction. The question that
has been worrying Kujal et al during
the long winter nights in Finland is how well do we humans do at reading dog’s
body language, not just with our own dogs, but with dogs as a species, and they
report out in the current issue of PLoS One (1).
The
experiment wasn’t designed around asking people what they thought. It was much
more adventurous in that they got the big magnet out and stuffed people in it
to watch their brains light up when they were watching interactions between
people and between dogs – they didn’t do people interacting with dogs and no
one was bitten.
They
had 20 expert dog handlers/owners and 19 non-doggy people as controls. Their
eye movements were tracked as they watched movies of student actors interacting,
and then movies of the local dog club dogs interacting. People or dogs moving
towards each other was seen as a friendly social interaction, while when
subjects move apart that was interpreted as a rather negative social interaction.
Many
parts of the brain lit up, but the region that turned out to be interesting was
the bits just inside your skull behind the top of your ears. That lit up with
everybody when people were coming together, but didn’t do much when the control
group of non-doggy people saw two dogs coming together. However, when the doggy
types watched dogs coming together, they got just as excited as when the
watched two humans approaching each other.
So
it seems that if we are doggy people, we have as much interest in the social
interactions of dogs as we do in those interactions between people. I had
better make it clear that this only applies to watching strangers, dogs or
human, and not to watching our friends and neighbors.
