Dogs understand what we say AND how we say it: Researchers find canine brains are far more capable than thought.
A groundbreaking study to investigate how dog brains process speech has revealed canines care about both what we say and how we say it.
It discovered that dogs, like people, use the left hemisphere to process words, and the right hemisphere brain region to process intonation.
It found praise activates dog’s reward centre only when both words and intonation match, according to the new study in Science.
Trained dogs around the fMRI scanner used in the study: Dogs, like people, use the left hemisphere to process words, and the right hemisphere brain region to process intonation, according to the new study in Science.
WHAT THEY FOUND
The brain activation images showed that dogs prefer to use their left hemisphere to process meaningful but not meaningless words.
This left bias was present for weak and strong levels of brain activations as well, and it was independent of intonation.
Dogs activate a right hemisphere brain area to tell apart praising and non-praising intonation.
Researchers also say dogs developed the neural mechanisms to process words much earlier than thought.
‘The human brain not only separately analyzes what we say and how we say it, but also integrates the two types of information, to arrive at a unified meaning.
‘Our findings suggest that dogs can also do all that, and they use very similar brain mechanisms,’ said lead researcher Attila Andics of Department of Ethology and MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
Andics and colleagues also found that praise activated dogs’ reward centre – the brain region which responds to all sorts of pleasurable stimuli, like food, sex, being petted, or even nice music in humans.