Scientists have used brain scans to determine that dogs can in fact understand what humans say as well as how they say it. They also found that similarly to humans, dogs use the left side of their brain to process meaning and the right side to process emotion or intonation.
“During speech processing, there is a well-known distribution of labour in the human brain,” said Dr Attila Andics who led the research published in the journal Science.
“It is mainly the left hemisphere’s job to process word meaning, and the right hemisphere’s job to process intonation. The human brain not only separately analyses what we say and how we say it, but also integrates the two types of information, to arrive at a unified meaning.
“Our findings suggest that dogs can also do all that, and they use very similar brain mechanisms.”
To make their astounding discovery, the researchers trained 13 dogs to lie very still in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine while listening to words spoken by their handlers.
The blood flow in the dogs’ brains were studied as they listened to positive phrases like “good boy,” “well done” and “clever” being said in an uplifting tone and in a neutral tone.
Neutral words such as “however” and “none the less” were also used. When the dogs heard these words, even if they were said in a positive tone, they didn’t react.
But their brains’ reward centres lit up when positive words were spoken in a positive tone, meaning there’s no fooling your pet into going to the vet just because you say it in an upbeat way!
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