19/05/2026
Humans follow unwritten social rules: if someone waves you over, you usually come closer; if they shoo you away, you leave. But do other animals share our expectations about gestures? Researchers at the Messerli Research Institute tested whether pet dogs notice when people break the “rules” of everyday non-verbal communication.
In an eye-tracking experiment, pet dogs watched videos of people responding to familiar gestures like “come here” and “go away.” Sometimes the response was the expected one, other times it was unexpectedly incongruent: a human actress walked away after being called over, or approached after being shooed off by a second human actress.
The dogs didn’t stare longer at these unexpected interactions, but their bodies told a different story: their pupils widened, a subtle sign of surprise or heightened attention, when the actress responded in unexpected ways.
The findings suggest dogs may quietly learn the unwritten rules of human interaction through everyday life with us. Remarkably, they reacted even when simply watching two human strangers interact, hinting that dogs may understand more about human social behaviour than we realise.
