Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [61]
The primal pull of gaze still affects dogs' behavior. If you stare unblinkingly at your dog, he may look away. Approached by a dog who appears overly aggressive or overly interested, a dog can diffuse some of that excitement by glancing to the side. Your chastisement or accusation of your dog accompanied by a glare may also provoke a demure averral of the dog's gaze. Given the easily recognized shifty look of the guilty man confronted by his accuser, it is no wonder that we attribute the same to the gaze-avoiding dog. The refusal to look us in the eyes contributes to a look of guilt—especially when we are already certain they have done something to inspire it. Whether they are themselves feeling guilt or atavism is not obvious.
But the fact that dogs will look us in the eyes allows us to treat them as a little more human. We apply to them the implicit rules that accompany human conversations. It is not uncommon to see a dog owner pause from scolding a "bad dog" to physically turn the dog's head back toward the owner's face. We want dogs to look at us when we are talking to them—just as we use gaze in human conversation, in which listeners look at the face of the speaker more than the reverse. (Notably, we do not stare at each other non-stop in conversation, and might feel unsettled if someone did.) There is more direct eye contact among humans speaking intimately or honestly, and we tend to extend that conversational dynamic to our dogs. We call their names before speaking to them, treating them like willing, if taciturn, interlocutors.
Gaze following
It doesn't happen at once, but not long after bringing a dog or puppy to your home for the first time you might notice something: nothing in the house is safe. Dogs train humans to become suddenly tidy: putting away shoes and socks almost as soon as they are removed; taking out the trash well before it heaps high; leaving nothing on the floor that could fit into the gaping mouth of a teething, excited, unrestrained pup. A temporary peace may ensue. After all, you can put things behind closed doors, into shut cabinets, and onto high shelves. Dogs look, baffled, in the area from which the (shoe, takeout container, hat) has mysteriously gone missing. But soon you will notice that the dog has learned something new: you are the source of the mysterious relocations—and you have a tendency to tip your hand.
How? You look. When we pick up the sock and set it down, we're not just attached to it by a hand; the action is accompanied by a gaze. We look where we are going. Later, we may look again at that safe sock spot when discussing the dog's earlier thievery. Again our gaze reveals the location of the sock: the gaze is itself information. We have already met this ability to use the direction of another's gaze, so-called gaze following, which infants do before reaching one year old. Dogs do it even sooner.
A gaze that intends to share information is simply a point done without hands. Following a point is a slightly simpler ability. Certainly dogs see a lot of pointing and gesturing as they observe human members of their families. This may be the source of their gaze-following ability, or it may simply bring out an innate ability to glean any information possible from our behavior. Researchers have tested the limits of their ability, natural or learned, in various experiments that put dogs in a context where they can get information from a person's pointing gesture. For instance,