Dogs really DO understand what you say ... and if you truly mean it
IF you are not being sincere when you tell your dog he’s a good boy, he will probably be able to tell.
A study has found dogs understand both what we say and how we say it.
Hungarian researchers found dogs love praise – with scans showing it caused the reward centres of their brains to light up.
But this only happened if owners used meaningful words and said them in a positive intonation.
Lead researcher Attila Andics, of the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, said: ‘Dog brains, just like our brains, can separately process and also combine what we say and how we say it.’
The researchers trained 13 family pet dogs – border collies, golden retrievers, a German shepherd and a Chinese crested – to lie motionless in an MRI scanner.
While the dogs lay there, trainers said Hungarian words which meant ‘clever’, ‘well done’ and ‘that’s it’ in both a praising and neutral tone. They also said other words which would have been meaningless to dogs, such as ‘as if’ and ‘yet’ in both tones. These words all have two syllables in Hungarian.
The scientists found that, just as in humans, the left side of the brain processed the meaning of the word, while the right side processed intonation.
In the dogs, scans showed that the left side of the brain was active in processing meaningful words, while the right side could tell the difference between praising and non-praising tones.
When the dog’s brain detected a meaningful word combined with praising intonation, this activated the reward centre.
Dr Andics said: ‘Dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant.’
Researchers claimed the study, published in the journal Science, shows that mechanisms in the brain which process words evolved earlier than previously thought and are not unique to humans.