Dog owners are familiar with their pets’ unmistakable behaviors—like tail wags and perked-up ears—but there’s a subtler behavior that might go unnoticed at first: blinking. While it might seem like an insignificant action, recent research has revealed that blinking could play an important role in how dogs socialize, offering scientists a new perspective on canine communication.
The study, published in Royal Society Open Science, demonstrates that dogs may mimic each other’s blinking behavior. This form of facial mimicry isn’t entirely new; previous studies have explored how dogs copy each other’s yawns or match playful facial expressions. However, this new research suggests that blinking—an often-overlooked behavior—could also be a visual cue that helps dogs bond.
A Subtle Social Signal
Dogs, like wolves, share a history of using visual cues as appeasement signals, especially in social interactions with other dogs or humans. These subtle signals—such as eye blinking and nose licking—are believed to help dogs signal non-aggression in uncertain social situations.
Blinking, in particular, plays an important role in social communication not just in dogs, but in humans and other primates as well. Studies have shown that humans synchronize their blinks with social partners as a form of communication. To explore if dogs use blinking in a similar way, researchers designed a study to observe how dogs respond to different facial cues.
The Study and Results
In the study, researchers showed dogs a series of 12-second videos featuring three actor dogs: a terrier, a cocker spaniel, and a border collie. The videos were divided into three sequences: one where the dogs simply looked at the camera, another where the dogs licked their noses, and a third where the dogs blinked. These videos were edited to display one facial cue every four seconds.
Fifty-four dogs were shown the videos while wearing heart-rate monitors to track their responses. While some dogs fell asleep, the ones that remained awake blinked about 16% more when watching the blinking sequence compared to the others. In contrast, the nose-licking sequence did not trigger a significant increase in nose-licking behavior, suggesting that blinking may serve a unique purpose in bonding.
Interestingly, the dogs’ heart rates stayed steady throughout the videos, indicating that they likely did not perceive the situation as stressful.
A Reflexive Form of Communication
The study suggests that blinking may be a reflexive form of communication for dogs, similar to how humans blink without conscious thought. The dogs in the study did not appear to blink more intentionally; instead, their increased blinking was an automatic reaction to the blinking behavior in the videos.
While further studies are needed to explore how dogs synchronize their blinks and what this may mean for their social behavior, this research opens up new possibilities for understanding how dogs communicate with one another—and even with us—through such subtle yet significant cues.
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