He believes that while this reveals a lot about dogs, it also says plenty about humans. “But quite little is known about what dogs get out of all of this, of how dogs interpret our words”.
Advertisement
Using neutral words in a positive tone, or positive words in a neutral tone, produced little reaction – or at least not one that shows up in MRI machines.
To convey information through speech, people use both words and intonation, which is the way a person’s voice rises and falls to express an emotion or meaning, such as praise or disapproval. And when they heard words of praise said in a praising tone, another important part of their brain lit up: the reward area.
“And they do it in a way that is similar to how it is done in the human brain”, he said, adding that the research was unique because how animals process human speech has not been analyzed this way elsewhere. “It shows that these words have meaning to dogs”.
To determine this, Dr Attila Andics and his colleagues at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest recruited 13 family dogs – mostly golden retrievers and border collies – and trained them to sit totally still for seven minutes in an fMRI scanner that measured their brain activity.
They had headphones on, and heard praise words in praising intonation like “super”, “well done”, “good boy”, Andics said.
The team found that the dogs used their left brain hemisphere when processing the meaning of words.
Wearing headphones, the dogs listened as trainers combined phrases with different intonations. This finding means that dogs may understand both the words and the intonation that humans use when they talk to dogs, the researchers said.
It makes sense, though, given that dogs have been hanging out with humans for tens of thousands of years.
Advertisement
Would you look at that, dogs understand everything we’re trying to tell them, so now my dog understands how broken I was when I used to vent to him all the time about my day’s misery.
