Brian Hare, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences in North Carolina, says that scientists have long believed that evolution made the human brain’s left hemisphere dominant in processing means of communication, leading to unique language abilities. They certainly wouldn’t be as cooperative on an fMRI scanner.
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The research is all due to the fact that, with enough treats, you can train a dog to do just about anything – including wear medical headgear while lying perfectly still in a loud, cramped machine. Exactly what dogs make of all that human chatter has always been a mystery. They had to lie awake, unrestrained and motionless for seven minutes in the scanner during the test – something many humans find tough to do. So sometimes, you could tell experts a thing or two about your pet. They react to the tone of voices as well as words. Side note: those are without a doubt, the most boring words we can imagine. The trainer would praise them with positive intonation (e.g., “well done!” in Hungarian), praise them with neutral intonation, or speak words that were meaningless to the dogs (e.g., “as if”) in positive or neutral intonations.
“[Dogs] not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant”, says Andics.
Study leader Attila Andics and his team from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest used 13 dogs over the course of the study, the majority of which were border collies and golden retrievers. The experts were able to scan and search what they were going through. Each word was spoken in a happy tone, and then a neutral tone. By matching words as well as tone, both parts of the brain worked together in order to give and interpret the meaning. The language was processed in the left hemisphere, the same as in humans. Scientists have found that dogs use the same brain areas as humans to process language.
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.
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Andics and colleagues also noted that praise activated dogs’ reward center – the brain region which responds to all sorts of pleasurable stimuli, like food, sex, being petted, or even nice music in humans.
