Karen Kaplan | Los Angeles Times (TNS)
Scientists say that our dogs comprehend our language more than we have previously acknowledged, and they have brain wave evidence to support this.
By placing electrodes on the heads of 18 pet dogs, researchers discovered compelling evidence that the animals didn't just recognize the patterns of sound from their owners' mouths ; they also understood that certain words refer to specific objects.This was reported in the journal Current Biology on Friday.
The findings “There has been a debate for many years about whether animals can grasp such a level of abstraction,” said study leader Marianna Boros, a neuroscientist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. The experiments with dogs challenge the idea that this ability is unique to humans.
Some exceptional dogs have been trained to learn the names of hundreds of objects, including a border collie from South Carolina who could recall the names of over 1,000 toys. Boros wondered if more dogs understood that words had meanings but just didn't have a way to show it. Even when dogs succeed in behavioral studies, she said, “you never know exactly what happens in the brain.”So she took inspiration from researchers studying language processing in humans and acquired an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine. The EEG measures brain waves and can determine the difference between the neural responses to an expected word and a surprising word. ethologist The researchers connected the EEG electrodes to the heads of 27 dogs and played recordings of their owners using familiar words in simple sentences, such as "Luna, here's the ball."
After a brief pause, the owner appeared with an object. The electrodes recorded the dogs' brain voltages as they processed what they heard and saw. ChaserThe tests continued for as long as a dog was willing to participate, Boros said. “The EEG studies with dogs are quite easy to run,” she said. “They just lay down.” Eighteen dogs that sat through at least 10 trials were included in the analysis. With all but four of those animals, the EEGs revealed a distinct pattern: The wave signals dropped significantly when there was a match between the word and the object.
This response was similar to the difference in EEGs when humans encounter an unexpected word, leading neuroscientists to believe that the brain was expecting a different word and had to put in extra effort to understand the sentence.
Boros and her colleagues believe the same process occurs in the brains of dogs: After hearing the word for an object, they mentally conjure it and anticipate seeing it. Then, when an object appears, it is either what they expected or something unexpected, and the dogs understood the spoken word. The difference between hearing the word and seeing the object is important, said Lilla Magyari
, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Stavanger in Norway, who worked on the study.
If a dog heard the word “ball” while looking at a ball in its owner’s hands, it might guess that the two go together because they were present at the same time, she said. But the experiment’s design prevented that from happening. Instead, the dog must have created an accurate mental representation of the spoken word.
The dog was thinking, “I heard the word, now the object needs to come,” Magyari said.
“Ball” was the most common vocabulary word among the dogs in the study. Several had words for “leash,” “phone” and “wallet.” Most had at least one name for a favorite toy, including one pet that understood four distinct words for different toys in the experiment.
It’s not clear from the study results whether all dogs have the capacity to learn words. The ones that participated in the experiment were volunteered by their owners, who vouched that their pets knew at least five words for objects. (One dog was said to have a vocabulary of 230 nouns.)
Marie Nitzschner spent a decade studying the cognitive abilities and communication skills of dogs at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. She said she had ever met only one dog that seemed to know words for specific objects. Even so, she said the study makes a strong case that the phenomenon is real. “It appears to me to be conclusive,” said Nitzschner, who was not involved in the work.
She added that dogs who lack this ability have nothing to worry about “because we still have
good communication options . However, if I noticed that my dog had a talent in this direction, I would probably try to encourage this talent.”Dog lovers are sure to be intrigued by the linguistic capabilities of their best friends. But the researchers see the study as a way to investigate why humans excel at language when other animals don’t.
“It’s kind of a mystery,” Magyari said. “We don’t know why all of a sudden humans were able to use such a complex system.”
By breaking it down into its component parts and studying whether any of them are shared with animals, “we can construct a theory about how language evolved in humans,” she said.
Of all species on Earth, dogs are singular study subjects because they live their entire lives immersed in a world rich with human speech. And unlike with cats, the ancestors of dogs were
selected for domestication
based on their ability to communicate with humans. “It’s super-relevant for them,” Boros said.
©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at
. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Researchers found evidence the animals did not merely recognize patterns of sound that come out of owners' mouths, they actually realized that certain words refer to specific objects.. However, if I noticed that my dog had a talent in this direction, I would probably try to encourage this talent.”
Dog lovers are sure to be intrigued by the linguistic capabilities of their best friends. But the researchers see the study as a way to investigate why humans excel at language when other animals don’t.
“It’s kind of a mystery,” Magyari said. “We don’t know why all of a sudden humans were able to use such a complex system.”
By breaking it down into its component parts and studying whether any of them are shared with animals, “we can construct a theory about how language evolved in humans,” she said.
Of all species on Earth, dogs are singular study subjects because they live their entire lives immersed in a world rich with human speech. And unlike with cats, the ancestors of dogs were selected for domestication based on their ability to communicate with humans.
“It’s super-relevant for them,” Boros said.
©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
