Think You Understand Your Dog? Think Again.

She was inspired by studies that explore how context clues affect people’s perceptions of others’ emotions. She was also inspired by a distinctly pandemic-era technology: Zoom. The video conferencing software has a feature that blurs out workers’ backgrounds. Ms Molinaro and her adviser, Clive Wynne — a canine-behavior expert at Arizona State — began to wonder if they could do something similar, creating videos that allowed people to see a dog’s behavior without seeing what was unfolding around it.

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“There’s no evidence at all that people actually see the dog,” Dr. Wynne said. “They seem to have a sort of a big blind spot around the dog himself.”

The study has limitations, including that it was based on the behavior of just a single dog. People might also perform better when asked to evaluate the emotions of their own dogs, Dr. Wynne said, and probably would have noticed signs of intense terror or trauma. (The scientists did not subject Oliver to any extremely negative experiences.)

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