Whether dogs truly understand the words we say — as opposed to things such as tone and context clues — is a question that has long perplexed owners, and so far science has not been able to deliver clear answers. A new brain wave study published on Friday in Current Biology suggests that hearing the names of their favorite toys actually activates dogs’ memories of those objects.
“It definitely shows us that it’s not human-unique to have this type of referential understanding,” said first author Lilla Magyari, a researcher at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, adding that scientists have been skeptical up to this point.
With a couple of famous exceptions, dogs have fared poorly on lab tests requiring them to fetch objects after hearing their names, and many experts have said it is not so much what we say, but how and when we say things that pique our pooches’ interest.
Photo: AFP
For example, yelling: “Go get the stick,” and having a dog successfully bring the object back does not conclusively prove they know what the word “stick” means.
Even scientists who concede that dogs pay attention to our speech have said that, rather than really understanding what words stand for, they are reacting to particular sounds with a learned behavior.
In the new paper, Magyari and colleagues applied a noninvasive brain imaging technique to 18 dogs at their lab in Budapest. The test involved taping electrodes to the dogs’ heads to monitor their brain activity.
Their owners said words for toys they were most familiar with — for example, “Kun-kun, look, the ball” — and then showed them either the matching object or a mismatched object. After analyzing the electroencephalography recordings, the team found different brain patterns when dogs were shown matching versus mismatched objects.
This experimental setup has been used for decades in humans, including babies, and is accepted as evidence of “semantic processing,” or understanding of meaning.
The test also had the benefit of not requiring the dogs to fetch something to prove their knowledge.
“We found the effect in 14 dogs,” co-first author Marianna Boros said, proving the ability is not confined to “a few exceptional dogs.”
Even the four that “failed” might have simply been tested on the wrong words, she added.
Holly Root-Gutteridge, a dog behavior scientist at the University of Lincoln in England, said that the ability to fetch specific toys by name had previously been deemed a “genius” quality.
Famous border collies Chaser and Rico could find and retrieve specific toys from large piles, but were deemed outliers, she said.
The new study “shows that a whole range of dogs are learning the names of the objects in terms of brain response even if they don’t demonstrate it behaviorally,” Root-Gutteridge said, adding that it was “another knock for humanity’s special and distinct qualities.”
The paper “provides further evidence that dogs might understand human vocalizations much better than we usually give them credit for,” added Federico Rossano, a cognitive scientist at University of California, San Diego.
Not all experts were equally enthusiastic.
Clive Wynne, a canine behaviorist at Arizona State University, said that he was “split” on the findings.
“I think the paper falls down when it wants to make the big picture claim that they have demonstrated what they call ‘semantic understanding,’” he said, although he praised the “ingenious” experimental setup as a new way to test the full extent of dogs’ “functional vocabulary.”
Wynne said that he needs to spell out the word “walk” when he is in front of his dog — lest his pet get excited for an outing there and then — but he does not need to take the same precautions in front of his wife, whose understanding of the word goes beyond simple association.
“Would [Ivan] Pavlov be surprised by these results?” said Wynne, referencing the famous Russian scientist who showed that dogs could be conditioned to salivate when they heard a bell signaling meal time. “I do not think he would be.”
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