In recent years, dogs have been shown to communicate socially more than had been thought before. So Hungarian researchers decided to test whether dogs would follow a human’s gaze if the person wanted to point something out.

Various adult dogs were shown short films in which a person would look straight ahead, then look at an object either to their left or right. In half of the films, the person would talk to the camera as if they were talking to the dog.

By using eye-tracking technology, the researchers could tell whether the dogs would look at the object when the person on the screen did.

The results showed that when the human spoke to the dog, then the pooch would follow their gaze to the object. If the dog didn’t think the person was talking to them, they wouldn’t follow their gaze and look at the same object.

The researchers say that there are “striking similarities” between adult dogs and babies that are too young to talk, in the way that they follow human signals.