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Eddie, one of the dogs who participated in the study, poses in the fMRI scanner with two of the toys used in the experiments, "Monkey" and "Piggy". Image via Gregory Berns.
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When your dog hears the word squirrelhe could pitch up or even run to a window and look out. But, for your dog, does the word mean "something is going on?" Or does your dog represent a small, shrub-tailed rodent?
According to a new study, dogs have at least a rudimentary neuronal representation of the words they have learned and can differentiate the words they have heard from those they have never heard.
The study, published on October 15, 2018 in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, used brain imaging to probe the way dogs treat the words they have learned to associate with objects.
Ashley Prichard is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology at Emory University and first author of the study. She said in a statement:
Many dog owners think that their dogs know what some words mean, but there is not really any scientific evidence to support that. We wanted to get data from the dogs themselves – not just owner reports.
Neuroscientist Gregory Berns is the lead author of the study and author of the bestselling book What is it like to be a dog?. Burns added:
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. Past research, however, suggests that dogs can rely on many other clues to follow a verbal command, such as the look, gestures and even the emotional expressions of their owners.
Berns is the founder of the Dog Project. The goal of the project is to better understand the dog's spirit. He was the first to train dogs to voluntarily enter a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanner and to remain motionless during the scan, without restraint or sedation. . Image via Gregory Burns.
The researchers focused on the issues surrounding the brain mechanisms used by dogs to differentiate words, or even what constitutes a word for a dog.
For the present study, 12 dogs of different breeds were trained to retrieve two different objects, based on their names. For the experiment, the trained dog was in the fMRI scanner while the dog owner stood directly in front of the dog when the machine opened and indicated the dog's toys at fixed intervals, then showed the dog the toys correspondents.
Eddie, a mix of Golden Retriever and Labrador, for example, heard his owner say the words porcine or monkeythen his owner brandished the matching toy. As a control, the owner then uttered chaotic words – such as bobbu and bodmick – then presented new objects like a hat or a doll.
The results showed a greater activation of the invented words in the auditory regions of the brain compared to the learned words. Pritchard said:
We expected dogs to make a neurological distinction between the words they know and the words they do not know. What is surprising is that the result is opposite to that of human research – people generally show greater neural activation for known words than for new words.
The researchers hypothesized that dogs could show greater neural activation to a new unknown word because they feel that their owners want them to understand what they are saying, and they are trying to do it. Berns said:
Dogs finally want to please their owners and may also receive praise or food.
He added:
Dogs may have different abilities and motivations to learn and understand human words, but they seem to have a neuronal representation of the meaning of the words they have been taught, beyond a simple low-level Pavlovian response.
Source: "Awake fMRI reveals areas of the brain for detecting new words in dogs"
Bottom line: A new study examines how dogs treat words.
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