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Ludwig Huber, of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, is interested in how the animals that live with humans perceive us. He has especially focused on how these animals perceive our faces and whether they are capable of exploiting this rich source of information for their own purposes. Huber has studied this in pigeons and even giant pandas, but recently he has turned his attention to dogs. He and his colleagues found that dogs could learn to discriminate the face of their owner from the face of another familiar person.

In a new study, Huber, along with Corsin Müller, Kira Schmitt, and Anjuli Barber, investigated whether dogs can also discriminate between emotional expressions on human faces. The researchers show dogs can tell the difference between happy and angry faces, the first strong evidence that an animal other than humans can discriminate between emotional expressions in another species.