Dog goggles help scientists learn how to best get their attention

There are plenty of strategies to train your dog, but is there a particularly effective method to get your pet pal to pay attention to you? A team of scientists believes the most successful technique likely involves combining two tried-and-true signals--and they gathered data from canines strapped with eye-tracking headgear to back up their theory. Dog owners frequently try communicating with their pets by looking or pointing directly at an object, but a team at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna recently wondered if either method (or a combination of the two) worked best. Led by comparative cognition postdoctoral candidate Christoph Völter, researchers introduced various communication scenarios to dogs to learn the answer. To evaluate the best human-to-dog strategy, a researcher first sat on their knees with a bowl on either side of them, only one of which contained a concealed treat.