Does your dog truly understand you?

Posted on September 1, 2016

Photo: flickr

For the last few years, Attila Andics and his colleagues in Hungary (Family Dog Project) are one of a handful of research groups training companion dogs to voluntarily go into an fMRI. Once in, the dogs are presented with different stimuli as their brains go under the giant figurative microscope.

In the recent study, dogs heard both familiar praise words and neutral words presented with a praising or neutral tone. The researchers found that, like us, dog brains separate out the vocabulary bits from the intonation, processing familiar words in the left hemisphere and intonation in auditory regions of the right, a finding that corroborates and extends earlier behavioral studies. The conclusion, according to Science, is that "dogs seem to understand both human words and intonation."

However, "understanding" is a tricky word. Studies using brain imaging technology cannot firmly say that the activation of a specific brain area indicates 'understanding'. For sure, dogs in this study reacted to the meaningful words, that is, to those words that their owners often use when they want to attract the dog's attention or provide a positive feedback for the dog. So in this sense our dogs recognized these words as familiar and probably meaning something good.

To read the full article, click on the link below.


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Source material from Scientific American