Small screens, compressed signals, and canine nature may all affect whether a dog can identify its owner on the phone or in a video chat.
Dogs can recognize owners on a television screen, "but it's a very bizarre place for your face to pop up and the rest of you is not there," says Nicholas Dodman, a veterinary behaviorist at Tufts University and chief scientific officer for DogTV, a television network designed for dogs. "Sometimes dogs seeing images on television of their owner will go to the back of the TV and see if there's anyone on the other side of the screen," Dodman says.
Smaller screens, such as those found on cell phones or tablets, may make it "harder to recreate the world for the dogs because they're smaller and the quality is more compressed," says Ron Levi, chief content officer for DogTV.
Systems like iCPooch, which allows an owner to give an onscreen "hello" and dispense a dog a treat remotely, show some dogs do respond to smaller devices, but "it depends on the dog," Levi says.
Some dogs seem less interested in images than other stimuli, Dodman says. With 220 million olfactory receptors in the canine nose--compared with a mere 5 million in a human--a dog may be far more intent on the scintillating scent of scat than a friendly face on a phone.
And scent hounds, such as a basset or beagle, which have been bred to hunt by smell rather than sight, may be even more easily distracted.
Tone of voice may also matter. A 2014 study in Current Biology found that dogs showed more brain activity in response to positive voice tones than negative ones.
But if you use your brightest voice and your dog doesn't react, don't feel bad. Some dogs just react more passively, or they may be confused because they can't see an owner's face.
"It's different strokes for different dogs," Dodman says, noting how elusive dog attention can be. His own dog once couldn't see a squirrel hanging on a window screen, "and it wasn't a squirrel on FaceTime. It was a real squirrel."
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