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This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher

in Tagata. You know how in the Roadrunner cartoons whenever something

drops like Wiley E coyote falling off a cliff it

makes this sound.

And obviously if you hear that sound you assume that something's falling down rather than going up and this is something that we as humans do automatically

Anna Korsionovska is an animal behavior scientist at the University of Sussex in the UK and she wanted to see whether dogs might also associate

falling objects with falling sounds.

But I'm sure we can't ask them.

So instead she recruited 101 canines, not all Dalmatians in case you're wondering, and she had the dogs watch a short video sequence in the lab of a blue ball rising and falling on the screen.

The video was accompanied by either a corresponding rising and

falling tone or the opposite, more counterintuitive pairing of the ball falling with a tone that was rising.

After running these tests, the researchers analyzed video of the dogs.

They coded each frame using a program called Gamebreaker, which is usually used to analyze

sports footage.

And the researchers found that while the dogs spent about the same amount of time looking at

both video sequences, they spent a larger proportion of that time tracing the movement

of the ball with their heads when the

direction of the ball and the sound aligned, perhaps suggesting that they were more

engaged when sight seemed to match sound. The results are in the journal

...