Dogs can recognize when you are lying

 

Researchers led by Akiko Takaoka from Kyoto University in Japan studied 34 dogs by using the old ‘point and fetch’ trick - a human points at the location of something, like a ball, a stick, or some food, and the dog runs off to find it.

They wanted to know if dogs were just blindly following these cues, or if they were adjusting their behaviour based on how reliable they perceived the person giving the cues to be. And if they didn't perceive this person as being reliable, how quickly would they learn to mistrust and disobey the humans who pointed in the wrong direction?

They found that the dogs were behaving in such a way that they are saying: “don’t fool me”

 

Reference: Takaoka et al (2015), Do dogs follow behavioral cues from an unreliable human?, Animal Cognition, 18 (2), 475-83

Link to reference: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-014-0816-2

Link to other articles: www.sciencealert.com/dogs-know-when-you-re-lying-to-them?

 Science Cartoon by Vishal K. Muliya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://vkmuliya.blogspot.com.

 

Follow @vkmuliya