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from the so-it's-just-ignoring-me-then? dept.
Neuroscientists from the University of Budapest used brain scanners to investigate the brain activity of dogs when they heard their owner's voice, and specific words spoken by the owner. The dogs heard both meaningful and nonsense words spoken in praising and neutral tones. They found that dogs respond to actual words and not just the tone in which they are spoken, which suggests dogs do comprehend the words. Their work appears in the latest issue of Science.
When the scientists analyzed the brain scans, they saw that—regardless of the trainer's intonation—the dogs processed the meaningful words in the left hemisphere of the brain, just as humans do, they write this week in Science. But the dogs didn't do this for the meaningless words. "There's no acoustic reason for this difference," Andics says. "It shows that these words have meaning to dogs."
From the paper's abstract:
During speech processing, human listeners can separately analyze lexical and intonational cues to arrive at a unified representation of communicative content. The evolution of this capacity can be best investigated by comparative studies. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored whether and how dog brains segregate and integrate lexical and intonational information. We found a left-hemisphere bias for processing meaningful words, independently of intonation; a right auditory brain region for distinguishing intonationally marked and unmarked words; and increased activity in primary reward regions only when both lexical and intonational information were consistent with praise. Neural mechanisms to separately analyze and integrate word meaning and intonation in dogs suggest that this capacity can evolve in the absence of language.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:02PM
You'd be in jail now for bestiality and rape.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Dunbal on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:16PM
Despite your childish comment I'll run with this topic instead of making a new one.
All dogs can talk. You just have to learn to listen. Most of their language is (like human communication) non verbal. Some of it is sub-vocal. All those little pants, sighs, yawns, grunts and groans have meaning. If you pay attention you can learn when your dog is alerting that it heard a "trespasser" long before it actually barks, for example.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:28PM
Are you, by chance, a police officer? A soldier? Security guard? Are you a dumb-as-a-brick human who demands respect at all times by non-verbal deference to your authority?
News flash, idiot: humans communicate verbally. And yes, fudkface, I am dissing your motherfucking ass.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday August 31 2016, @08:25PM
No, I'm a physician.
Experts would disagree [wikipedia.org] with you.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:49PM
Perhaps, but a lot of the meaning is imaginary and exists only in the mind of a human.
Sighs and yawns usually mean the same things as they mean in humans, cats, apes, and dogs. These are biological in nature and exist in a wide variety of mammals.
Dogs don't alert on a trespasser by yawning. A twitched ear, a sniff of the air, a raised head maybe. But not a yawn or sigh.
The sigh is usually boredom, just like it is in humans, or disappointment, like that car sounded like our car but it didn't stop, or I'm getting hungry, or sleepy, or wanna go outside.
Lots of people have mistaken ideas about what their dog is trying to say (and often the first mistake is that the dog is "trying to say" anything at all).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:59PM
exactly, anthromorphism - "My dog LOVES me". No it doesn't, you feed it.
The study was interesting, because the control language they used was Hungarian - no European relatives apart from Finnish and Estonian.
The problem is , a human treated the same way would give the same result. Only anecdotal but in Finland making head or tail of the road signs was desperately unproductive - thank goodness for GPS smartphones...
Put simply, the conclusions that intelligence is not binary, is probably correct. 3 billion years of adaptation requires many little victories, and being able to match sounds is one. Being able to anticipate social cues is another.
But last time I checked, comprehension required using the word in a sentence, and not even the chimps have gotten that far...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jelizondo on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:16PM
If by "sentence" you mean a construct with nouns, verbs and adjectives, you are right; if you mean combining two previously learned concepts to create a new one, you are wrong.
Dogs (Chaser in the link below) can make the connection between an unknown word and an unknown object... which is evidence of inference on their part.
So, check again [youtube.com] and the doc is with Neal deGrasse Tyson, to top it off!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Dunbal on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:49PM
"My dog LOVES me". No it doesn't, you feed it.
Which fails to account for those well documented cases when some dogs starve to death - IN THE PRESENCE OF FOOD - when their owner dies. Love is a social instinct. It's what keeps the pack/family together. Dogs feel love, like any other creature.
(Score: 2) by danomac on Thursday September 01 2016, @12:48AM
To me it's evident that the dogs howled when my mother's health turned, as they'd never howled before. It was quite odd, but both dogs knew somehow that something was wrong with their owner, even though they were apart by some distance. Had you told me this beforehand I would've said "Nah, not possible." But after experiencing it, I was quite surprised.
And yes, both dogs refused to eat when we got home. We eventually coaxed one into eating after a day and a half and the other followed.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday September 01 2016, @02:12PM
"My dog LOVES me". No it doesn't, you feed it.
Which fails to account for those well documented cases when some dogs starve to death - IN THE PRESENCE OF FOOD - when their owner dies.
Unfortunately, that's mostly wishful thinking [slate.com]. It's common lore that "cats will eat a dead owner, but dogs won't," but a simple search will bring up plenty of cases disputing this. (I also tried to find the "well documented cases" you mention of dogs starving themselves to death rather than eating an owner, and I wasn't able to in a few brief searches. Not saying it never happened, but it's certainly not the normal behavior of dogs.) Dogs may prefer to eat other food than their owners in some circumstances, but the vast majority will happily chow down on an owner if no other food source is available.
Love is a social instinct. It's what keeps the pack/family together. Dogs feel love, like any other creature.
Again, this is anthropomorphizing them. Is there a "bond"? Sure, but it's one of convenience and instinct. Dogs, like most animals, don't generally kill and eat their own young (except in unusual circumstances), because genetically they're programmed not to. If they did, their species wouldn't survive long. It's not because of "love." Dogs, like most pack animals, also recognize the scents of others in their pack and acknowledge the usefulness of a pack for survival. It's instinctual. But so is survival -- if those dogs are forced into a situation of choosing between death and eating whatever meat is around (their dead owner, their dead pack members, etc.), they'll eventually choose the latter.
And frankly many humans, pushed into a survival situation, would eat other dead humans too. Would they eat other family members? Possibly not, but if so it's not really "love" that's preventing it: it's the strength of the "taboo." Dogs may understand a lot of things, but they don't have the human equivalent of taboo. Well, they can be taught something like taboos by owners, but most dogs will happily override them in a survival situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @02:52AM
Since when did comprehension require using a word in a sentence?
You think babies don't comprehend words before they can speak? Are mutes unable to comprehend anything? If I tell you what a ball is, do you not understand until you use it yourself in a sentence yourself?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:05PM
Sighs and yawns usually mean the same things as they mean in humans, cats, apes, and dogs. These are biological in nature and exist in a wide variety of mammals.
It appears to be slightly more complicated than that.
Can Dogs Feel Our Emotions? Yawn Study Suggests Yes [nationalgeographic.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Dunbal on Wednesday August 31 2016, @08:31PM
Perhaps, but a lot of the meaning is imaginary and exists only in the mind of a human.
No, the meaning is there if you're willing to see a dog as a dog and not as a miniature human. Dogs are highly intelligent, but it is not human intelligence. Dogs are extremely creative, but again you need to understand their objectives are usually different than your objectives. And if ever you've had a dog pretending to be choking to death or dying of a squinty eye next to you at mealtimes, you will also know they are master manipulators.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @02:46AM
You must be a special advanced lifeforms that can understand meaning correctly then.
Except the part where for some reason you claim dogs don't alert on a trespasser by yawning, even though no one said they did.
That imaginary meaning was only ever in your own mind, but you sure did teach it a lesson. Are we also in error thinking you were "trying to say" anything at all?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 01 2016, @03:32AM
Pro dog trainer here with 45 years and upward of 3000 dogs worth of experience.
Dumb dogs understand at the level of a 2-3YO child. Smart dogs are more like a 5-6YO child, and can get pretty close to the same level of vocabulary, comprehension, and reasoning as that child. Just everyday talking to the dog will teach it a good deal of language, same as it does kids. Once they know a word, you can't fool them with tone of voice or dragging the word out or mixing it with nonsense; if it doesn't fool your kindergarteners, it won't fool your dog. Researchers may be astonished to discover this, but perceptive owners are not.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.