[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Dogs can also follow human gestures, such as an outstretched finger or a nod of the head to find food.

My cat responds to hand signals. And he definitely needs no signals to find food.

[Altariel]

But cats do not do this:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2757998/posts

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NARRATOR: The key to a dog’s ability to read our emotions might lie in something we all do without knowing it.

DANIEL MILLS: When we express our emotions in our faces, we don’t do it symmetrically. It’s been shown that, if you take somebody’s face when they’re expressing some emotion like happiness or anger or something like that, there is a difference between the left and right side.

NARRATOR: Composite faces consisting of two right or two left sides look very different.

DANIEL MILLS: One of the theories is that maybe our emotions are more faithfully presented in the right side of our face, and that’s the side that we tune in to.

And when we look at a face, we have what’s known as a natural left-gaze bias, so you naturally look much more towards the left, i.e. the right-hand side, of somebody’s face.

NARRATOR: Eye-tracking software demonstrates that, when presented with a human face, we nearly always look left first. Daniel Mills wants to find out if dogs use the same trick to read human faces.

DANIEL MILLS: Shifting the direction of your gaze, we thought, was fairly unique to people, until we started looking at dogs.

ANAÏS RACCA (University of Lincoln, England): Taz! Tazy!

NARRATOR: To test the theory, his team recreates this experiment with dogs.

ANAÏS RACCA: Moose, what’s that?

NARRATOR: They present a series of images showing human faces, dog faces and inanimate objects and record the direction of a dog’s gaze with a video camera.

ANAÏS RACCA: We found that dogs, when they are looking at pictures of dog faces or objects, they will look randomly on the left or the right.

NARRATOR: But, when it comes to human faces, they make a remarkable discovery.

ANAÏS RACCA: So now we have Taz looking at a human face. So, first she’s looking in the middle of the screen, and here is the first eye movements on the left. She’s in the middle and she’s going on the left.

So, now, this is Moose, and then we can see really well that this is a left gaze; from here to here. We can see the white here. She’s even moving her head.

NARRATOR: Does this mean dogs can read human emotions? As far as we know, no other animal has this relationship with the human face. And dogs don’t do this with each other. This suggests that dogs have acquired a new skill enabling them to communicate with us on an emotional level.

DANIEL MILLS: Being able to detect when somebody is angry or potentially going to be harmful to them, you could understand that there may be a biological advantage in being able to read people’s emotions and, equally, that it makes sense for a dog to approach somebody when they’re smiling.

If dogs can read human emotion, and increasingly the scientific evidence is beginning to point in that direction, that’s going to form the basis of a very powerful bond between human and dog.

NARRATOR: Evidence like this appears to underpin our conviction that dogs understand us in a way that other animals cannot.