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Most dog owners feel a special connection with their pet. They speak like a child or a friend and are convinced that the dog understands, but how much of what you say can reach the floppy ears? A recent study by researchers at Emory University attempted to answer this question, but the answer to this question may not be exactly what puppy fans want to hear.
"Many dog owners think their dogs know what some words mean, but there is not really any scientific evidence to prove it," said Ashley Prichard, first author of the recently published study in Frontiers in Neuroscience. "We wanted to get data from the dogs themselves – not just owner reports." According to Prichard's colleague and lead author of the study, Gregory Berns, the fact that dogs can learn verbal commands shows that they are able to handle some of what we say, but previous studies have suggested that they also get the necessary information from nonverbal cues. like gestures, expressions and looks. Emory scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see how the brain of twelve trained dogs would react when they were shown a pair of toys and that one would hear the corresponding words to each toy. Dogs were also told words of gibberish and alternative objects. Interestingly, dogs reacted more in the auditory regions of their brains to words they did not know.
"We expected dogs to make a neurological distinction between the words they know and the words they do not know," Prichard said. "What is surprising is that the result is opposed to that of human research.People generally show greater neuronal activation for known words than for new words." Scientists believe that the peak of brain activity is the dog's attempt to understand what the owners are asking him. "The dogs finally want to please their owners," said Berns, "and may also receive praise or food." Different breeds showed increased activity in different regions of the brain, but none of the breeds in the study seemed to fully understand what they were told. "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 Pavlovian answer" said Berns.
In case you want more salt in this wound, researchers say that for training purposes, visual and olfactory cues may be more effective than spoken orders. In other words, the words you say to your dog are probably unimportant, but keep the treats to come and your pet will hang on each of your words.
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