If you’ve ever caught yourself chatting to your dog, it might not have been as silly as you think. An article published by the scientists from Hungary in a journal called Science called theresults of the test “very exciting and surprising”, according to the report.
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The same goes for humans!
Dog lovers already know that a kindly word means a lot to the family pet, but researchers now understand why.
During the experiments, dog owners voiced different combinations of words and tones: praise words with approving intonation, praise words with neutral intonation, neutral words with praising intonation, and neutral words with neutral intonation.
“We see now that speech processing mechanisms in dogs and humans are more similar than we thought”, Andics said.
Dogs have socialised with humans for thousands of years.
Trained dogs gather around the fMRI scanner in Budapest. But the really cool part is that they could actually distinguish between words, even when they were spoken with the same intonation. The study’s author said getting the dogs to lie still was the hardest part.
Scientists have found evidence to support what many dog owners have long believed: that a man’s best friend really does understand some of what it is that we say to them. “Again, this is very similar to what human brains do”, Andics said.
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 the rewards centers in their brains lit up the most when the positive words were said in the more positive voice.
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“The most hard aspect of this training is for dogs to understand that being motionless means really motionless”, said Andics, who published the findings in the journal Science. “The main result is not that they can differentiate words, but that they differentiate meaningful and meaningless words, and the left hemisphere has a key role there”, he said.
