Does Your Dog Watch TV? What It Reveals About Their Personality Might Surprise You

Does your dog like to watch TV? If so, pay close attention to how they react to what they're watching. According to a study published in Scientific Reports, how canines interact with visual and auditory stimuli on the TV can reveal a lot about their personality.

"I’ve seen them watch TVs or look at TVs. But do we really know what they’re extracting from it?" Jeffrey Katz, a comparative cognition researcher at Auburn University and co-author of the study, told ScienceNews.

To find out the answer, researchers distributed a survey to dog owners via social media between February and March 2024, asking them about their dogs' personalities and TV viewing habits, including how their pets reacted (like pawing at the TV or growling) in response to different stimuli. The final survey sample consisted of 453 dogs ranging in age from two months to 16 years old.

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The survey revealed that dogs described as excitable were more likely to follow on-screen objects as if they were real. Anxious or fearful dogs were more likely to engage with non-animal stimuli like cars or doorbells. Overall, the owners reported that their animals prefer television programming that included other dogs and animals, with almost half of the dogs barking or howling in response to on-screen barking.

The research team had hoped that by testing dogs' reactions to TV programs, they might learn how to make the activity more mentally stimulating for the animals. "In practice, engagement with television could provide dogs with an enriching, meaningful experience," wrote the researchers in the paper published in Scientific Reports.

Katz told Popular Science that he thought that such tests could be used to select universally soothing videos for dogs. However, based on the highly individualized, temperament-based responses the animals showed in the survey, it seems less likely. "We wanted to come up with a more general set of stimuli that all dogs would like," he said. Determining what a dog might like to see on TV is "easy to do for individual dogs, but harder for groups," he added.

Lane Montgomery, a psychologist at Auburn University and a co-author of the study, told BBC Science Focus that "the main goal of this study was to better characterize how dogs respond to different types of television programming in order to increase the efficacy of television as an enrichment tool for dogs. By knowing what types of television programming dogs respond to, dog television programming can be refined to what dogs are most likely to enjoy."