A new study suggests that your dog may understand some of what you’re saying.
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Researchers imaged the brains of 13 dogs using a technique called functional MRI, or fMRI, which records brain activity. Apparently, that’s wrong! While dogs indeed understand different tones, they likewise know what some particular words mean.
The scans showed that the dog’s reward center was activated only when the trainers used praise words in a praising intonation. The full results of the study were published by Science.
Brian Hare, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences in Durham, N.C., adds the study was important because it involved awake animals, as compared to similar studies that were done on restrained or drugged subjects.
This shows a fairly sophisticated ability to comprehend language and intention, differing from human capacities perhaps only in degree, not kind. We can talk and think and understand each other and do all kinds of things animals can’t do, right?
Once the dogs were in the machine, a trainer familiar to the dogs read out a series of words. The dogs had been trained to lie motionless in the scanner while they listened to recordings of their trainer’s voice.
“But there was no difference for meaningless words, and this effect was independent from intonation”.
The experiments confirmed what many people with dogs already knew: Our canine comrades are deeply tuned in both to the words we use and how we use them. They hear “good boy” as they’re getting a treat or a belly rub, and figure out that it means praise.
If you’ve ever caught yourself chatting to your dog, it might not have been as silly as you think.
However, during the scans, dogs seemed to be more responsive when they were being praised in an encouraging tone. “To find that dogs have a very similar neural mechanism to tell apart meaningful words from meaningless sound sequences is, I think, really wonderful”.
Then, researchers monitored each dog’s brain waves while they played various phrases.
In humans, the left side of the brain specializes in identifying meaning in spoken words. The work here suggests that dogs can actually perceive the meaning of certain bits of human speech.
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Andics says what makes human communication unique is the invention of words, not the ability to process them. Praise words, regardless of intonation, were associated with a greater response in the left hemisphere than in the right.
