Dogs may be able to treat the meaning of certain words, reveals an analysis of the brain

"We know that dogs have the ability to address at least some aspects of human language since they can learn to follow verbal commands," said Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns, lead author of the 39; study. "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 one of the founders of the Dog Project, which seeks to probe the evolutionary history of man's best friend. The project was the first to train dogs to voluntarily enter and remain motionless in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which looks like a powerful and intimidating machine – but they braved it.

As part of the Dog project, researchers had already learned more about the inner neural function of dogs, including how dogs treat faces and smells. Previously, researchers from the MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group in Budapest had used fMRI to show that dogs had an unusual ability to capture our emotions only from our speech, suggesting that our dog friends were able to to feel our emotional currents through changes in the tone of our voice. This time, researchers sought to study how dogs treat words.

To this end, 12 dogs were trained by their respective owners to retrieve two different objects when they were called by name. The objects had to have a different appearance and feel to facilitate discrimination, such as a stuffed animal or a rubber toy. The training was considered complete when a dog systematically retrieved the requested toy when it was presented to him with both objects.

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In one experiment, the dog had to stay in an fMRI scanner while the owner, standing in front of the opening of the machine, called the names of the toys and then showed the corresponding objects. For example, when Eddie, a mix of Golden Retriever and Labrador, heard the words "Piggy" or "Monkey", the owner handed him the matching toy. Sometimes the owner uttered gibberish words such as "bobbu" and "bodmick" and showed new items that the dog had never encountered before.

The fMRI analysis revealed that the auditory regions of the dog in the brain were more active when they heard the words to designate new objects, compared to the trained words. This result was rather unexpected because it is exactly the opposite of how people's brains behave: we generally show greater neuronal activity for known words than for new words.

Although we can not ask dogs what is happening, researchers are assuming that dogs could show greater neural activation in the auditory region of the brain because they pay more attention to new words – perhaps feeling that their owners want them to obey. Dogs know that they will receive a treat if they like their owners. He may therefore be encouraged to be more attentive to new words.

Half of the dogs exhibited increased activation in their parietotemporal cortex, a region of the brain that, according to the researchers, could be analogous to the angular gyrus in humans, where the meaning of words is treated. The other half of the canines showed increased activity when they heard new words in other areas of the brain, such as the left temporal cortex and amygdala, the caudate nucleus and the thalamus.

These differences may be due to the fact that different breeds and sizes of dogs.

But the big delivery of this study, published in the newspaper Frontiers in Neuroscienceis that dogs seem to have a neural representation of the meaning of the words they have thought of – an answer that seems beyond a conditioned Pavlovian response. In other words, it seems that your dog can understand some of what you say after all.

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