Our canine companions can understand more than simple commands, according to a new study. Dogs understand what certain words mean, according to researchers who monitored the dogs' brain activity while they were shown balls, slippers, leashes and other familiar objects.
Dogs can understand the meaning of nouns PHOTO Archive
Therefore, the dog's brain can perceive more than commands like “sit”, “lay down” and “fetch”, having the ability to understand the meaning of nouns, notes The Guardian.
“I think all dogs have the ability,” said Marianna Boros, who helped organize the experiments at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.
“This changes our understanding of the evolution of language and our sense of what is uniquely human”she added.
Scientists have long been fascinated by the fact that quadrupeds can actually learn the meaning of words, and have come up with evidence for this.
Dogs can learn the names of different objects
A 2022 survey found that dog owners believed their furry companions could understand the meaning of between 15 and 215 words.
Hard evidence of canine cognitive prowess came in 2011, when psychologists in South Carolina reported that after three years of intensive training, a border collie named Chaser had learned the names of more than 1,000 objects, including 800 cloth toys, 116 balls and 26 frisbees.
However, studies have not detailed what happens in the canine brain when it processes words.
To unravel the mystery, Boros and her colleagues invited 18 dog owners to bring their pets into the lab along with five objects the animals were familiar with. These included balls, slippers, frisbees, rubber toys, pencils and other items.
In the laboratory, owners were instructed to say words designating objects before showing the dog either the correct or another item. For example, an owner might say “Look, here's the ball,” but hold a frisbee.
The experiments were repeated several times with matching and non-matching objects. During the tests, the researchers monitored the dogs' brain activity using non-invasive electroencephalography, or EEG.
The results revealed different patterns of activity when the objects did or did not match the words spoken by the owner. The difference was more pronounced for the words that owners thought their pets knew best.
Similar fluctuations were observed in EEG recordings when people performed tests. People either understood the words well enough to form a mental representation that was either confirmed or contradicted by the object they later saw.
In Current Biology, scientists say the results
“provides the first neural evidence of object word knowledge in an animal”. Boros emphasized that he does not claim that quadrupeds understand words as well as humans.
More work will be needed to understand, for example, whether our furry friends learn manners similarly to humans as children.
The study also raises the question of why, if dogs understand certain nouns, more of them do not show them. One possibility is that a dog knows what a word refers to, but doesn't feel it needs to respond in any way.
“Doghis mine only cares about his ball”,
Boros said.
“If I bring him another toy, he doesn't care for it at all.”
Dr Holly Root-Gutteridge, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lincoln who was not involved in the study, called the work “fascinating”.
“It's particularly interesting because I think it's unlikely that this started during domestication, so it may have spread to mammals.” she said.
