The researchers said it is unlikely that human selection of dogs during their domestication, which occurred at least 15,000 years ago, could have led to this sort of brain function. The trainers used praises like “super” as well as neutral words like “however” in different tones.
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Ever wondered if your dog can REALLY understand what you are saying?
The experiment that the researchers conducted to accomplish the study involved training dogs to enter a magnetic resonance imaging machine, where they laid down in a harness. The dogs heard words of praise familiar to the dogs, such as “well done”, and neutral words like “if” and “yet”. Brain scans revealed that, like humans, dogs processed words with the left side of their brains and used the right side to process pitch. Of course the biggest response in the dogs’ brains’ reward centers came from praise words said in a praising tone.
The head of the study says that the results prove that dogs separate what we say from how we say it and can combine intonation and vocabulary to form a correct interpretation of what we are saying. Their trainers spoke praise words (like “super” or “good boy”) with a neutral tone, praise words with a praising tone, neutral words (like “however” or “nevertheless”) with a praising tone, and neutral words with a neutral tone.
Regarding other domestic pets, researchers say those animals are harder to test due to their lack of interest in human speech.
Similar to people, dogs process meaningful words in the left hemisphere, while tone is distinguished in the right auditory brain region, according to the study, published recently in the journal Science. We trained the dogs to lie motionless.
Dogs might know a lot more than we give them credit for, according to a research team in Budapest.
Dogs process both what we say and how we say it in a way which is amazingly similar to how human brains do.
This means that they are more attentive to what people say to them and how they say it.
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“There’s no special neuron mechanism, it seems from this study, in humans that made us able to start using words”.
