Your Dog Can Likely Recognize Your Face in a Photo — Here’s How We Know

After you’ve come home from a long day at work or a trip to the grocery store, your dog may be the first thing to greet you as you walk through the door. With their tail wagging out of control, they’re beyond happy to see you. But how do they know it’s you walking through the door and not a stranger?

While dogs don’t process faces the same way as humans, they can recognize people by sight, scent, and through prior experiences with them, including facial expressions and other body language, according to 2020 papers published in Frontiers in Psychology.

So, if a dog can recognize a person who is present in the room, could it also recognize the person in a photograph? And if so, how?

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Tracking Dogs’ Eye Movements

Researchers have been working to determine whether dogs can recognize human faces from images for years. One 2013 study from the journal Animal Cognition analyzed a dog’s eye movements over an image of people — both familiar and strangers — and dogs — also both familiar and strangers.

The results showed that dogs tended to look at dog images longer, regardless of how familiar they were with the dog or the human.

However, dogs looked longer at human faces they recognized than at those of strangers. The study also found that dogs tended to look more at the eyes of familiar faces than at those of strangers.

Testing Dogs’ Ability to Recognize Their Owners

A 2020 study in Animal Cognition wanted to see if dogs could recognize images of their owners from optimal and not-so-optimal images. In the study, researchers set up a challenge in which, to reunite with their owners, the dogs had to choose the correct location based on a photograph of their owner’s face versus a photograph of a stranger.

The results indicated that the dogs were more likely to approach an image of their owner than a stranger. And that the image quality did not matter.

How Do We Know Dogs Recognize Our Faces?

While certain studies suggest that dogs can recognize their owner’s faces, one 2015 study published in PeerJ helped clarify how dogs process faces more generally.

For the study, six dogs were trained to lie still in an fMRI machine without sedation or restraint. While in the machine, researchers presented the dog with images of everyday objects, other dog faces, and human faces.

During the study, the research team identified a region in the dog’s brain, known as the canine temporal lobe, that responded more strongly to images of human faces than to everyday objects. The team also noted that this area of the brain shared a similar response with the dog and human images.

Overall, the results showed that no particular face seemed to appear in the dog’s primary visual cortex, meaning this wasn’t just a typical visual response. And according to the study authors, the research revealed that face processing is not unique to primates.

To this day, researchers continue to study the unique ways dogs and humans interact. Who knows what we will discover next?

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