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Stare into a dog’s eyes and you may encounter a bemused expression. But researchers have found that dogs blink more often when they see their owners doing so, suggesting there may be more to the mutual gaze than meets the eye.

Scientists have previously found that dogs turn on the puppy eyes when humans look at them, and that their brains can distinguish happy human faces from other expressions – even telling apart fearful faces from those that are angry or sad.

But while previous work has suggested dogs and humans may synchronise their blinking, and dogs may blink more when interacting with their owners rather than a familiar trainer, questions have remained over whether human blinking affects how often dogs bat their eyelids.

Dr Chiara Canori, the first author of the new study, from the University of Parma, said: “What we wanted to do here was experimentally isolate the human blink and separate it from all the other things that normally happen during a real social interaction, which has never been done before.”

Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Canori and colleagues report how they analysed recordings of 35 dogs of different breeds as each was shown two types of video.

Both videos lasted 40 seconds and showed three people, one at a time: the dog’s owner and two unfamiliar humans. In one video, the humans each blinked once every three seconds, and in the other video they looked straight ahead without blinking.

The results reveal dogs blinked more often when the on-screen humans blinked than when they did not. Further analysis found dogs only increased their rate of blinking when they were shown their owners blinking compared with when they displayed a still gaze – with the effect not seen for strangers.

“This suggests that the social relevance of the partner matters,” said Canori, adding that the results were not explained by dogs looking at their owners for longer. The team found no evidence that the dogs synchronised their blinking with that of humans.

Canori said the findings suggested blinking – an important mechanism for protecting the eye and keeping it moist – may have acquired a social relevance.

“As of today, however, we cannot say that a dog deliberately blinks in order to convey a particular message,” she said. “It may provide subtle feedback about attention or engagement and perhaps help coordinate an interaction with another individual, particularly with a socially important partner.”

Canori stressed that owners should not interpret an individual blink as having a specific, fixed meaning. “Our study does not show that every time a dog blinks it is deliberately ‘saying’ something,” she said. “What our work suggests is that this apparently simple and automatic behaviour can nevertheless be influenced by the social context. Dogs appear sensitive to blinking in other individuals, and their own blinking can change depending on who they are interacting with.”

Dr Laura Cuaya, of the University of Vienna, who was not involved in the work, welcomed the findings but noted that the study’s design revealed more about how dogs perceive human blinks than whether they use blinking as a communicative cue.

“Still, this study shows how socially sensitive our dogs are to subtle cues, such as blinking, on our faces,” she said. “I would be very interested to see researchers measure in their next studies whether our blinking behaviour changes when we interact with our dogs in social contexts.”