A new study published Wednesday shows that dogs have the ability to understand people’s intentions and react accordingly.
Findings of the behavioral study presented in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, He recommends that dogs show more patience when humans are clumsy or incapable of nurturing them, compared to when they are reluctant and choose to taunt.
Researchers at the Clever Dog Laboratories at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna closely observed the reactions of nearly 100 dogs to people who fed them slices of sausage.
In the study, the scientists behaved differently with the dogs—sometimes awkwardly dropping the rewards so their four-legged friends couldn’t reach them, and sometimes making fun of the dogs by holding the sausages in front of them and pulling them quickly.
In an interaction with the dogs, the researchers also tried to pass the sausage through a plexiglass partition.
The results show that dogs show more patience with unskilled people than with unscrupulous people.
Previous studies have established a close social bond between humans and dogs, but researchers have a limited understanding of how dogs understand human intent.
In the new study, researchers tracked the dogs’ body movements using eight cameras as they presented the dogs with food in different ways.
The scientists monitored the dogs’ reactions over a 30-second period, during which the dogs had to wait to get their food.
Using a machine-learning algorithm trained to detect and track specific spots on the dogs’ bodies, the researchers can track the behavioral patterns displayed by the dogs.
The new study found that dogs respond differently to this “incompetence”, “teasing” and “incompetence” exhibited by the researchers.
Scientists say that when teased, dogs more often avert their gaze, lie on the ground in frustration, or run up to their owners more often than their behavior is clumsy.
They say that dogs are the ones least able to watch, when people show utter helplessness when they want to squeeze the sausages without splitting them.
“Our study provides evidence that dogs discriminate between superficially similar human actions that lead to the same outcome but differ markedly in underlying intentions,” the scientists wrote in the study.
“Dogs pretended to understand the underlying intentions, for example, by waiting longer for food to arrive from the clumsy than the cynical human,” they said.
At the end of the study, each dog was given two rewards without being teased, as a reward for their patience, the researchers say.