Dogs also recognize the owner's face in photos

Dogs also recognize the owner's face in photography. The "DogUp" laboratory of the University of Padua demonstrated this with a study just published in the "Animal Cognition" magazine, in which the dogs were temporarily separated from their owner. At that point, to find it, the animals had to observe two photographs with two faces, one of the owner and the other of a foreign person, in two different points of the room. Most of the dogs approached the photo with the owner's face, showing that their recognition skills are independent of movement and three-dimensional information. Studies conducted so far had already shown that dogs recognize people's faces live, but had never made it clear whether this also applied to photographs. "Many think that dogs mainly use the sense of smell to recognize people or other animals. Yet visual information is just as, if not more important than the sense of smell - explains Paolo Mongillo, professor of Physiology and Veterinary Ethology at the University of Padua, Among the authors of the study - for humans the face contains special information, elaborated by specific and dedicated mechanisms of our nervous system. These studies lay the foundations for understanding whether dogs also use the same visual processing mechanisms. "