Andics and his colleagues scanned the brains of 13 dogs from four breeds – border collies, golden retrievers, Chinese crested dogs, and German shepherds – who were trained to lie still in the scanner while they listened to recordings of their trainer’s voice. The left hemisphere of dogs’ brains-the same region we use to process speech-showed different activation patterns for different words, and the auditory processing regions in the right hemisphere responded to tones, just like ours.
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Only words of praise spoken in a positive tone provoked significant reactions, making the reward centers in a dog’s brain light up.
While dogs process words in much the same way as humans do, researchers say we’re unique in our ability to use them. “Dog brains care about both what we say and how we say it”, lead author Attila Andics told the Associated Press. “Praise can work as a reward only if both word meaning and intonation match”. So the moral of the story is don’t try and get your dog excited about a visit to the vet by using a high-pitched voice, they are onto your shenaningans.
The study may help improve communications between dogs and humans. Just as humans do, they process these two aspects of speech separately, then integrate them to determine the full meaning of what was said.
Dogs learn speech like humans after volunteering for an MRI.
Dog lovers already know that a kindly word means a lot to the family pet, but researchers now understand why. The study found that the dogs only recognized the familiar words with their corresponding intonations.
According to the study it’s not likely that humans could have selected dogs for this function during their domestication.
Some scientists reference the old and new research as evidence that dogs have language-processing neural capacities that were previously thought to be uniquely human. This finding is consistent with previous work, which found that when dogs hear emotional speech-like sounds, they tend to turn to the left-suggesting they’re using the right sides of their brains-and when they hear verbal commands from a robot, they turn to the right.
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“I think it shows the way that domestication has shaped dogs to pay attention to yet another important human social cue”, she said.
