Scientists have finally proven what every dog owner knows - our canine friends read our facial expressions like dedicated detectives.
Dogs don't just depend on verbal commands to figure out what we want, a new study shows. Instead, they look into our eyes and try to guess what we're up to, according to the study published in Current Biology.

Hungarian researchers showed that dogs will even follow our gaze if we make eye contact with them first.

This study "reveals that dogs are receptive to human communication in a manner that was previously only attributed only to 6-month-old human infants," said study co-author Jozsef Topal a researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Topal and his colleagues studied 29 canines. The dogs were shown a movie of a woman who sometimes would stare straight at the dog and call out to him and then turn her head to stare at an object next to her. The other times the woman would just turn her head and stare at the object.

For the most part, dogs who were addressed both through eye contact and with a verbal greeting tended to follow the gaze of the woman in the movie. When no eye contact was made, the dogs didn't follow the gaze of the woman.

There have been similar experiments in babies, Topal said. And the dogs are behaving just as 6-month-olds do.

The new findings come as no surprise to Crystal Knode, a 51-year-old legal secretary from San Jose, Calif. Her 9-year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Rachel, is always observing family members' body language and facial expressions.

"She anticipates what is going to happen," Knode said. "She watches and takes cues to figure out what I'm going to do and what I'm not going to do. Dogs are very attuned to body language and hand motions."