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We like to tell dogs what to do, but we rarely consider them to understand what we are saying. Pet owners assume that their dogs include commands such as seat, stay, or heel– even play dead and Make me famous Instagram,From elsewhere – but without the ability to read their thoughts, no one can know for sure. A new ingenious study in Frontiers in Neurosciencehowever, find a way to determine which of our orders they actually understand.
The fact that we can teach tips to dogs clearly shows that at a basic level, they can distinguish words from non-words. But in the new document released Monday, the goal was to understand what's really going on in a dog's brain when he hears his owner's command.
"This study highlights the fact that dogs do not treat language like humans, even though we train dogs with verbal commands to perform actions, it does not mean that they derive the same meaning from the names." in the same way as humans. " – author Ashley Prichard tells reverse. Prichard is a Ph.D. student at Emory University and specializes in the study of the neural mechanisms underlying perception and decision-making in dogs using "waking fMRI".
Before the 12 canine participants got into the fMRI machine, their owners would train them for ten minutes a day to pick up a stuffed plush toy called "monkey" or a rubber-shaped toy called "pig". .
At the end of the multi-month training session, each dog was asked to lie down in the fMRI scanner while his owner stood directly in front of him. In some of the tests, the owner would say "piggy" or "monkey" and then brandish the respective toy. In other cases, the owner brandished random objects, such as a hat or a doll, and associated them with a gibberish word, such as "bobbu" and "bobmick".
When the puppies heard "pig" or "monkey", the brain activity did not change much. When they heard gibberishhowever, there was greater activation in the auditory regions of the brain. It is the opposite what happens when humans experience the same thing: we demonstrate greater neural activation when we hear words we know.
"The most interesting finding is probably that the greater neuronal activation of pseudowords [gibberish] Prichard explains: "In human fMRI, greater brain activation of pseudowords than known words means that humans are probably trying to attach meaning to pseudowords whose sound is similar to that of known words. words that they already know. "
Prichard's reasons that dogs who have heard gibberish could do the same thing – trying to understand unfamiliar words. Dogs have been wired by natural selection to make us happy – and to want the cookies we give them when they please – so it makes sense that they strive to make sense of these nonsense .
When study dogs heard gibberish, half of them showed increased activity in their parietotemporal cortex, which may be analogous to the part of the human brain that processes lexical differences, and the other half, increased activity in their left temporal cortex, amygdala. , caudate nucleus and thalamus. The researchers believe that these differences in brain regions are probably due to the diversity of breeds and sizes, but one thing is clearer: each of these dogs probably had trouble understanding what was happening.
This is not to say that the dogs did not respond to the words on which they had been trained at home at all. Behaviorally, dogs have demonstrated that they have the ability to recover both toys only by listening to "piggy" or "monkey". Meanwhile, the fMRI data revealed that their brain was distinguishing between words by engaging regions similar to the regions of the human brain involved in language processing.
Although humans still accept verbal commands from their pets, this study highlights the fact that language is not the best way to communicate with a dog. The most effective way to communicate with a dog is to use visual and olfactory cues.
"Anyone who has a dog can think that he's an expert, but you really need to deepen the research on how dogs think and perceive the world, not just how we think humans are." says Prichard. "I hope this research will be a step towards better man-dog interactions."
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