Want to trick a dog? It's all in the body language, a new study finds.
When given a choice between a big serving of food and a small one, dogs almost always go for the bigger option. But when a person makes a fuss over the small amount, particularly by handling it, dogs can be tricked into picking the less-hearty portion.
The study, published Wednesday (April 25) in the journal PLoS ONE, highlights dogs' ability to follow human social cues, a tendency which has likely served them well over thousands of years of domestication.
Researchers recruited 149 dog owners to bring their ordinary household pets into the psychology laboratory at the University of Milan, Italy. There, study leader Sarah Marshall-Pescini and her colleagues set up a series of experiments in which dogs had a choice between two plates, one with a single piece of food on it and one with six pieces. Other experiments had dogs choosing between equal-size portions.
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