Dogs have long been called man's best friend, and stories of the strong bond between man and dog has been well documented in literature throughout the centuries. Now, a new study has concluded that canines are capable of recognizing their owners and other familiar people in still images, but may actually prefer to examine the image of other dogs.

According to a study conducted by the University of Helsinki that was reported on by Alpha Galileo, dogs are capable of recognizing facial features of humans and other animals holistically, something that was previously thought to only occur with humans and select members of the primate family. Scientists such as lead researcher Professor Outi Vainio conducted an experiment to test the spontaneous reaction of dogs to an image to track if the dogs could see their owner in the still image. This test would then determine if dogs not trained to recognize their owner's face would still do so in a still image and if they would react different to their owner's image than to the image of a stranger.

Dogs were trained to lay down in front of an image and stay focused on the images that flash on screen. Scientists would track the eye movements of the dogs as they examined the images to gauge their familiarity and recognition of the people and dogs shown in the test. The images ranged from images of their owners, other dogs that lived with the dog being tested, as well as both human and canine strangers. The test shown that dogs prefer the images of their human and dog families rather than strangers, indicating that dogs can indeed use facial recognition.

However, it was noted during the study that dogs preferred the images of dogs over those of humans, even if they are unfamiliar with the dog. The study also showed that dogs will look more into the eyes and faces of familiar humans and scan them in more detail than the faces of strangers.

The science team also showed the dogs in the study upside-down images of their owners and strangers to see if, like humans, dogs processed upside-down images differently than regular images. The study concluded that, while dogs will focus more on the eyes of a upside-down image of a person more than usual, they are able to recognize their owners even though the image was upside-down.