Whether due to its temperament or not, it is not always easy to get a dog to focus on what you want to show it. Who hasn’t felt that sense of discouragement when their dog searches in vain for a tennis ball placed right under its nose or when nothing seems able to divert its gaze, stubbornly fixated on a squirrel or another dog at the nearby park. Yet, thanks to a new study, your pet will no longer be able to ignore you. This research indeed reveals the foolproof technique to grab a dog’s attention.
Dogs Wearing Special Glasses
Gazing at a specific object while talking (a behavior known as referential communication) constitutes an early form of human communication that plays a key role in how babies learn language. Yet, in non-human animals, dogs also display a notable ability to follow these referential signals, but the optimal way to interact with them in this context had remained uncertain until now. For example, many owners encounter difficulties in drawing their dog’s attention to a particular element in their environment.
In this new study, Austrian scientists used eye-tracking devices worn by the canids to observe their reactions to human signals. The eye movements were thus carefully recorded to measure how often they followed the experimenter’s gestures and whether they complied with the given instructions. Although the study initially gathered about thirty dogs, not all of them tolerated the eye-tracking equipment, which looked like ski goggles. In the end, the team had to continue the experiment with twenty dogs including eight mixed-breeds, four terriers, two Australian Shepherds, two Poodles, one Collie, a Flat-Coated Retriever, a German Shepherd, and one Rhodesian Ridgeback.
The experiment, conducted in the Clever Dog Lab at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, placed each dog facing the experimenter, who was kneeling. Two bowls sat on either side of the scientist, but only one of them concealed a treat. The dogs underwent five different scenarios repeated six times each. The researchers pointed at the bowl while gazing at the dog or pointed and looked at the bowl simultaneously or simply fixed their gaze on the bowl. They even carried out a well-known owner’s gag: pretending to throw a ball toward the bowl while keeping it in hand.
The Results of These Experiments
According to the study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences in February 2025, pairing gaze with the pointing gesture constitutes the most effective method to help owners indicate a direction to their dog and to signal the presence of a hidden treat. The gaze and the gesture are effective separately, “but together, they are more powerful,” said Christoph Völter, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Austrian university.
If the eye-tracking recordings showed that dogs achieved their best results when the experimenter pointed and looked simultaneously at the bowl containing the treat, their performance was, unsurprisingly, less strong when the human pretended to throw a ball. “These results could also explain why previous research struggled to convincingly demonstrate that dogs follow gaze or gesture when presented in isolation,” says Völter. “The key seems to reside in the combination of these signals.”
The researchers propose that this could be explained by the difficulty for dogs to divert their gaze from a person who is staring at them while pointing.
Questions About the True Understanding of Dogs
For the researchers, this discovery suggests that dogs react to human referential signals and not merely to directional cues. In other words, dogs appear to grasp the meaning of the given cue (here, the information that a treat lies in a particular direction) rather than just running to wherever they are pointed.
However, they refrain from drawing premature conclusions. Völter notes that despite the empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the gaze-point pairing, it would be premature to claim that dogs fully comprehend the communicative nature of these signals in the way humans do. “Is it, for them, an imperative directive telling them where to go? Or do they perceive it as a more complex form of communication?” he questions. Additional research would therefore be necessary.
The team now hopes to replicate the study with a larger sample of dogs. Above all, the researchers want to draw on these new insights to determine whether dogs can learn and memorize things more effectively using this method. This could also help shed more light on the secrets of their cognition.
