Why do dogs tilt their heads? What the science actually found

For something every dog owner has seen, the head tilt went almost completely unstudied for a very long time. Researchers at the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest only got to it by accident. They were studying a rare group of dogs they call Gifted Word Learners: dogs that can learn the names of dozens of toys and fetch the right one on request.

While filming those dogs, the team kept noticing the same thing. An owner would say “Where’s the teddy?” and the dog would cock its head before trotting off to find it. So they went back through the footage and counted. The result, published in Animal Cognition in 2021 by Andrea Sommese, Claudia Fugazza, Ádám Miklósi and colleagues, was the first scientific paper on head tilting in dogs.

The researchers compared 7 gifted word-learner dogs with 33 typical family dogs, all being asked by their owners to bring a named toy. The gap was striking.

Two more details make it interesting. First, each dog had a favorite side: the direction of a dog’s tilt stayed consistent across tests run months apart, a bit like being left- or right-handed. Second, the side had nothing to do with where the owner was standing. Whether the owner was on the dog’s left, right or straight ahead, the dog tilted the same way. That makes “the dog is just turning an ear toward the sound” a less likely explanation, at least in this setting.

The authors’ working idea is that the tilt goes with processing something meaningful. A gifted dog hearing “teddy” may be matching the word to a picture of the toy in its memory. The researchers compare it, cautiously, to the way people sometimes tilt their heads while trying to recall something.

Not necessarily, and the researchers were careful to say so. The study only looked at one situation: an owner asking for a named toy. The team has stressed that it would be wrong to conclude only gifted dogs tilt their heads. Plenty of ordinary dogs tilt when they hear a squeaky toy, a strange noise from the TV, or their name said in a funny voice.

There are also real limits. The gifted group was tiny (it shrank to 6 dogs in later experiments, after one died) and the frequent tilters were all Border collies. Plenty of typical dogs in the study were Border collies too, so the authors warn against reading it as a breed trait, but nobody has yet tested a large, mixed group. Tilting also wasn’t measured against whether the dog fetched the right toy. So a tilt is a sign your dog is tuned in, not a score on an IQ test.

Psychologist Stanley Coren has a different, complementary idea. A dog’s muzzle sits right in the middle of its view and can block the lower half of your face, including your mouth, which carries a lot of emotional information. Tilting the head might be a way to see around it.

In 2013 he tested the hunch with an online survey of 582 dog owners. Owners of longer-muzzled dogs were more likely to say their dog tilted its head often when spoken to (71%) than owners of flat-faced breeds like pugs and bulldogs (52%). Coren himself called it “a first step”: a self-reported survey, not an experiment, and he noted that hearing, or just learning that tilting gets a happy reaction, could also be part of it.

That last point is worth taking seriously. Most owners respond to a head tilt with a delighted “awww” and maybe a treat. Dogs are very good at repeating whatever gets them attention, so some tilting may simply be learned.

Probably more than one, and the honest answer is that the science is young. Here is where each idea stands:

• Paying attention to meaningful words: the best direct evidence so far, from one small, careful study.
• Seeing around the muzzle: plausible, supported only by an owner survey.
• Locating or tuning in to sound: popular online, but in the 2021 study the tilt side did not follow the owner’s position.
• Learned because we love it: very likely for some dogs, though not formally tested.

If you want to run your own kitchen experiment, try saying the names of your dog’s favorite things (walk, ball, a person’s name) and then some nonsense words in the same tone. It proves nothing, but it is a fun way to learn which words your dog has filed away. Teaching toy names on purpose is a good game too: our trick training guides are a place to start.