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If Your Dog Is Blinking at You, It May Be Trying to Tell You Something, Science Suggests

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Trying to catch him napping, baseball card portrait LCCN2007685714.tif
Photo: American Tobacco Company, sponsor / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

The new study , published in the journal Royal Society Open Science , is based on the observation that dogs' own blinking changes depending on whether the human they're watching is blinking – and, importantly, whether that human is their particular person.

Previous research has found that dogs blink more when shown other blinking dogs, and other studies have suggested that dogs may synchronize their blinking with humans during live interactions. The researchers say the increased blink rate shows that the dogs are obviously paying attention to their known human's eye movements.

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