Deciphering How Dogs Process Words
If you’ve ever wondered how dogs process what we say to them, you’re not alone. Scientists have been chasing the mystery behind how our furry friends process human words in a study by Emory Health Sciences.
The study questions how dogs process and react to human words. If an owner yells “Squirrel” does the dog process it as a command to be alert, or does it interpret it and see it as a representation of the furry creature it likes to chase? These are the questions that scientists are trying to answer.
Frontiers in Neuroscience published one of the first studies that conducted brain imaging on canines to probe how they processed words that they have been taught to associate with objects. The study found that they at least have a basic understanding of words and what they are associated with. Dogs have been found to know the difference between words they know, and those they don’t.
“Many dog owners think that their dogs know what some words mean, but there really isn’t much scientific evidence to support that,” said Ashley Prichard, a PhD candidate in Emory’s Department of Psychology. “We wanted to get data from the dogs themselves — not just owner reports.”
The Dog Project, founded by Gregory Berns, senior author of the above study, was the first to train dogs to enter and stay motionless inside of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner without sedation or restraint. This allowed them to further study the dogs and how their brains process information such as recognizing and remembering faces.
For the newest study, 12 dogs of varying breed were trained to retrieve two different objects by their name. Each dog’s objects consisted of one that was soft, usually a stuffed animal, and one made of rubber to facilitate discrimination.
During the study, owners would hold up one of the two objects and call it by name, such as “Monkey” or “Piggy” than reward the dog with a treat when they retrieved it.
The second part of the study had owners holding up different objects and calling them nonsense names such as “bobbu” or “babu”. The study found that dogs’ brains responded more to the novel words than to the words they were trained to respond to, the opposite of what happens in human brains.
Researchers believe that this response is because the dog knows the owner wants them to understand the new novel word compared to the one they already know, in other words, they want to please their owner.
“Dogs may have varying capacity and motivation for learning and understanding human words,” said Berns. “But they appear to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they have been taught, beyond just a low-level Pavlovian response.”
The conclusion of the study states that verbal cues may not be the best way to communicate with a dog. In fact, dogs often respond more to scent or visual cues.
“When people want to teach their dog a trick, they often use a verbal command because that’s what we humans prefer,” said Prichard. “From the dog’s perspective, however, a visual command might be more effective, helping the dog learn the trick faster.”
