Reward regions of the brain became active only when both words and tone were consistent with praise. That means they understand words differently from intonations – which have always been thought as the reason that dogs can respond to commands. Andics, a neuroscientist at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, explained that when dogs hear speech, they seem to separate the meaning of the words from the inflection and independently analyze each aspect of speech.
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“It shows that for dogs, a nice praise can very well work as a reward, but it works best if both words and intonation match”, said Andics.
Humans talk to their dogs on a regular basis, but no one knows exactly what happens when those words reach the canine brain. Like humans, they process word meanings in the brain’s left hemisphere and intonation in the right hemisphere.
Scientists have used brain scans to determine that dogs can in fact understand what humans say as well as how they say it. “But quite little is known about what dogs get out of all of this, of how dogs interpret our words”. That’s basically the same way humans respond to speech, too.
If you’ve ever caught yourself chatting to your dog, it might not have been as silly as you think.
You might want to watch what you say around your dog.it turns out he might be able to understand you. When processing intonation, the dogs favored the right brain hemisphere.
According to a new study in Science, our pets are actually quite smart. Since we spend most of our time around them, we might also want to consider cleaning up our language.
Andics and colleagues trained 13 dogs to lie still in an fMRI scanner as a trainer spoke to them. Looking at the brain scans, the researchers looked for brain regions that differentiated between meaningful and meaningless words, or between praising and non-praising intonations.
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“That’s really cool! I don’t own a dog, so I’m not for sure [if it’s true], but I know cats don’t have [that ability] because my cat doesn’t listen very well”, Ray said.
