Dogs are these inseparable animals that, well educated, are an inexhaustible source of companionship and love, always ready to play, follow you and always be with you, are the first to feel your presence when you go home, and usually those who welcome you the most. You can only be five minutes from home, but when you get back, your displays of affection will be almost the same as if you’d spent a year outdoors.
They have high hearing and a strong sense of smell, but they also have vision, a sense that doesn’t take the top spot for them, but they also use and use it primarily to move, they also use their eyesight to recognize people. In this article we will determine in a concrete way how dogs recognize our face.
- For us humans.
- Visual recognition of faces is a process that takes place quickly and efficiently in our brains.
- In addition.
- It is a process that stands out not only because it is very fast or because it is linked to long-term memory processes.
- But also stands out because it is “falsely selective”.
- As if that weren’t enough.
- Anatomically we have an area of the temporal cortex dedicated to facial recognition.
What we call “falsely selective” Certainly, if you’re not from Japan and you see a group of Japanese together, they all seem to have very similar traits. In fact, you feel like you could confuse him perfectly. It’s something that’s going to happen to Japanese men and women.
The fact that there is less variability between their bodies than between people in their social environment is easy to distinguish, is because we are not used to differentiating their faces, a big flaw in this is that for our ancestors it was very important to know how to differentiate some Japanese from each other and?except for exceptional cases?
Finally, before we enter the canine world, we would like to point out that there is a disorder in humans related to the difficulty of recognizing faces: prosopagnosia.
“If a dog doesn’t come near you after looking at your face, you’d better go home and examine your conscience. -Woodrow Wilson-
They usually look at us from a lower height, and if we look at them for a few seconds they usually tilt their heads, as if to ask us what we want, facial recognition is part of the advanced social behavior that dogs show with us.
As for evolution, it makes sense to think that, in history, dogs that were experts in recognizing human faces had a great advantage over threats on those who did not, perfectly identifying the human being who cared for them and those who did not treat them. would probably ensure their survival and therefore increase the chances that they would have to reproduce.
Several studies have been carried out on facial recognition in dogs, by studying their eye movements we were able to verify that a dog is able to distinguish known faces from strangers and, among them, that of their owners. Thanks to this type of study, we also know that the faces of other dogs attract more attention than those of strangers.
In another study, published in? And based solely on animal behavior, the researchers found that a dog pays more attention to its owner when it has a bare face than if it is covered.
Finally, studies that analyzed the activation of dogs’ brains by MRI directly involved two areas of the brain in facial recognition:
One way or another, what leaves no doubt is that dogs love the faces of caregivers We leave you a fun video to illustrate this idea!