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There has been much talk of canine intelligence in recent years. But whatever the conclusions of the studies, anyone who has had a friend on all fours can attest: the dogs include. Now, a study published in the journal Frontiers of Neuroscience has revealed that, in addition to emotions, dogs seem to understand words .
— The brain of dogs in fMRI
A study of US neuroscientists badyzed dogs in fMRI measuring brain activity . The research revealed different brain patterns in dogs when they heard words they had previously heard compared to completely new words.
Clearly, this is not enough to suggest that dogs actually imagine a plate of food when they hear the words. words "eat!"; but this highlights the fact that some sort of recognition is going on, based on the word itself.
The research team says that it is an important step in understanding how dogs treat language, especially because it uses the data collected from the dogs instead of the observations of their owner, which can be subjective.
"We know that dogs have the ability to deal with at least some aspects of human language because they can learn to follow verbal commands," says Gregory Berns. , neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta (United States). "However, previous research suggests that dogs can rely on many other signals to follow a verbal command, such as the appearance, gestures, and even emotional expressions of their owners."
(You can access the study from this page. LINK )
— The Experience —
L & # 39; The survey used 12 dogs of different breeds, driven by their owner for several months to distinguish two objects and recover the correct object when his name was said. Once the dogs showed that they could choose the right object each time, the researchers performed the fMRI badysis experiments.
The owners at the end of the scanner were then asked to indicate the names of the items that the dogs had found. learned, as well as "pseudo-words" that they had never heard before, such as "prang", "ropp" or "cloft". In parallel, the owners owned objects, either objects with which the dogs had been trained, or objects chosen at random, such as hats or dolls. they said and presented new words and new objects. The team explained that this may be because the dogs wanted to please their owners and were trying to understand what he was saying to them. the researchers, Ashley Prichard, Emory University. "What is surprising is that the result is the opposite of that of human research: people tend to show greater neuronal activation for familiar words than for new words."
— Different parts of the brain —
Even though the increase in brain activity was constant in all dogs when new words were spoken, it was not safe. It is not produced in the same region of the brain. In half of the cases, it appeared in the parietotemporal cortex, which, according to the researchers, could be used to distinguish the orders. In the other half, increased brain activity appeared elsewhere: through the left temporal cortex (related to audio processing), the amygdala (emotion management), the caudate nucleus (learning and motor control) and the thalamus ( motor and sensory signals.)
Scientists suggest that this difference in results may be due to the fact that different dog breeds have been used, each with its own way of following orders. So, for now, we do not know for sure what happens in a dog's brain when he hears words. But they seem smart enough to identify at least some of the words that are said to them.
"Dogs can have different abilities and motivations to learn and understand human words," says Berns, "but they seem to have a representation He concluded," The intelligence of dogs has made it ". has been the subject of many studies and recently it has been discovered that not all breeds of dogs have the same intelligence.
Source: N + 1
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