Dogs blink more when watching their owners blink, study finds

We adore our dogs, and we are sure the feeling is mutual. Still, it is easy to question whether they truly take notice of us – or whether they are simply hoping we will drop some cheese.

Fresh research indicates that dogs are highly tuned in to humans, right down to the way we blink.

A new study published in Royal Society Open Science found that dogs alter their own blinking according to whether the person they are watching is blinking – and, crucially, whether that person is their own human.

This does not mean your dog has perfected meaningful eye contact, nor that you and your canine companion are exchanging secret messages in eyelid Morse code. It does, however, indicate that dogs respond to something as momentary as a blink, especially when it comes from a person who matters socially to them.

Dogs respond to their owners' blinking

Researchers from the University of Parma in Italy examined 38 dogs, although only 35 eventually satisfied the requirements for the analysis; three were too distracted by the unfamiliar setting to finish the task – sound familiar?

The team chose to investigate blinking because it is "an ancient, automatic physiological behavior that did not originally evolve as a social signal," Eleanora Biffi, a study co-author, told ScienceAlert.

"Blinking could provide subtle information about attention, engagement, or affiliation."

In view of dogs' sensitivity, the researchers "thought it was plausible that they might also respond to such a subtle movement as a blink, and that this response could be influenced by their relationship with the person."

The dogs were shown brief videos of three people: their owner, an unfamiliar woman and an unfamiliar man.

Each video had two versions. In one version, the person blinked every three seconds. In the other, they looked directly at the camera with a neutral facial expression and did not blink.

The exceptionally good dogs watched each version for 40 seconds as the researchers recorded their behaviour.

As expected, the dogs followed the humans' blinking.

Overall, the dogs blinked significantly more while viewing blinking people than when watching people whose gaze remained entirely still, which is how the researchers established this result.

The particularly notable finding emerged when the person on screen was someone the dog knew.

Dogs blinked more frequently as they watched their carers blink, but the same pattern did not appear when they watched unfamiliar people. Put another way, seeing moving human eyelids alone was not enough to make dogs blink more – who those eyelids belonged to was important.

Female owners and canine blinking rates

The study also revealed an intriguing difference linked to sex: dogs blinked more when viewing their female owners than when watching either unfamiliar person, or when their owners were male.

However, the researchers stress that this finding needs to be interpreted carefully. The study was not designed to distinguish an owner's sex from factors such as care history or the particular nature of the dog–human relationship.

Does this mean dogs blink back at us as a small canine expression of affection?

Possibly. Yet the researchers are not prepared to make that claim at this stage.

"[The study] suggests that dog–human communication may therefore involve not only obvious signals such as vocalizations, postures, or gaze direction, but also very small facial movements that we normally overlook," says Biffi.

Blinking clearly serves a physical function – keeping the eye's surface moist and protected – but researchers are becoming increasingly interested in whether it may also convey information about attention, arousal or social bonds.

There are notable earlier findings in this area. Past research has shown that dogs blink more after seeing other dogs blink, while other work has suggested that dogs could synchronise their blinking with people during face-to-face interactions.

Behavioural synchronisation in dogs has been suggested as a form of "social glue", potentially reinforcing relationships between individuals who know one another. Cats and other primates have likewise been found to give blinking psychological significance.

Dogs do not necessarily blink in synchrony

This particular experiment, though, slightly dampened the suggestion that dogs were directly matching our blinks.

The researchers searched for a dog blink within 1.5 seconds of a human blink. Among 96 dog-blink events, 57.3 percent occurred within that interval. That figure was therefore not significantly different from chance.

In short, dogs blinked more often when their humans blinked, but they did not consistently blink at the same time as them.

According to the researchers, the elevated blink rate makes clear that dogs notice the eye movements of a familiar human. It remains unknown whether a dog's own blinking represents automatic imitation or forms part of a wider social mechanism.

Since the dogs watched prerecorded video rather than engaging with a real person, the experiment did not include the immediate feedback that might be required for true behavioural synchronisation.

The findings also raise a host of further questions. "We now know that looking at their owner blink can influence how frequently dogs blink, but we still do not know what this modulation means," says Biffi.

"Does blinking provide feedback about attention or engagement? Is it associated with a relaxed or non-threatening interaction? And does reciprocal blinking affect a dog's willingness to approach, maintain contact, or continue interacting?"

Addressing those questions will require detailed behavioural coding alongside measurements of gaze, arousal and physiological state.

These findings contribute to evidence showing that dogs are exceptionally observant of humans and adapt to us in many different ways.

Read the complete study in The Royal Society Open Science.

This article was fact-checked by Michael Irving and edited by Michael Irving. Although we take pride in our process, we are only human. If you notice an error, please tell us.