So basically, if you’re praising you’re dog – go for it.
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While the dogs lay there, trainers said Hungarian words which meant “clever”, “well done” and “that’s it” in both a praising and neutral tone.
The results showed that, just like in people, dogs process the meaning of words in the left half of the brain, while the right side of the brain comes into action when the intonation is processed.
It was only when both sides of the brain agreed they were hearing praise that the dog was truly happy. Four different recordings were played with either praise words (such as “well done!”) or neutral words (such as “however” or “nevertheless”) coupled with either a high-pitched intonation indicative of praise, or a neutral intonation.
According to a press release from Science magazine “The findings. suggest that the neural mechanisms to process words evolved much earlier than previously thought, and they are not unique to the human brain”.
While other species probably also have the mental ability to understand language like dogs, their lack of interest in human speech makes it hard to test, says Andics.
Dogs’ ability to communicate with humans is old news.
“It turned out that when we praise a dog it activates the reward centre of their brain but only if word meaning and intonation are praising”, added Dr Andics. The left hemisphere of the canine brain processes meaning, while tone of voice is dealt with in the right hemisphere.
To carry out the study, 13 dogs were trained to lie motionless in an MRI scanner awake and unrestrained. The team also noticed that the reward center, a part of the brain associated with pleasure, only activated when the dogs heard praise words in a positive, praising tone.
New research however has found that dogs also possess very similar skills to us and may even be able to understand what their owner is saying, in terms of intonation at the very least. “We let them listen to their trainer’s speech and at the same time we measured their brain activities”, said Andics.
While this was only the dogs’ “word-meaning representation”, it still shows they had an idea of what message the specific sound of an individual human word was created to convey.
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“There’s no acoustic reason for this difference”, says study leader Attila Andics. A recent study has discovered that dog may learn language similar to the way their human owners learn language.
