They noted that the dog is truly happy only when its brain’s both sides agreed they were hearing positive words.
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You might want to watch what you say around your dog.it turns out he might be able to understand you. “But our words and intonations are not meaningless to dogs”. We made a decision to look into the brain.
That means we are not as special as we like to think, at least when it comes to how our brains deal with language.
“The results showed something very interesting”.
He said the findings suggested the mental ability to process language evolved in humans earlier than previously thought.
The study is the first to investigate how dogs follow speech.
Hungarian researchers scanned dogs’ brain activity while they listen to their owners and found that they are capable of differentiating between words and the tone in which they are said. When the trainers’ words and voice inflection were positive, the dogs registered that they were being praised.
Because domestication happened over a relatively short period of time, scientists believe it’s unlikely human influence alone accounts for the development of vocabulary and intonation processing centers in the brain.
They found that dogs processed words with the left hemisphere of their brains, while intonation was processed with the right hemisphere.
The pups also processed intonation in the right hemisphere of their brains, again like humans.
Trainers then spoke both familiar and unfamiliar to the dogs in various ways, in a sing-song “good boy” then in a neutral tone.
“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.
A study published this week in the journal Science suggests dogs can understand both the words that humans speak and the way they are intoned. This is similar to the way humans process the same information.
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Research showed that man’s best friend does not just pick up on the tone of human voices – the animal learns the meaning of individual words.
