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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: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:26PM
ANYONE who owns a dog can tell you this. Personally I'd put them at about the level of a three year old child for intelligence, and honestly a hell of a lot higher than most adult humans for honesty, loyalty, and unselfish love. I'm definitely a cat person, but will give credit where it's due.
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(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:33PM
Agreed. Even my cats know words. "Bug-bug" makes them look at the ceiling and walk around mewing looking for a bug. "Foo-foo" and they run to the kitchen for their wet food. I've tried to teach them other things but they don't give a damn unless it's in some way beneficial to them. Even though "foo-foo" sounds stupid it has proven useful to finding a cat that has escaped. They'll ignore you calling their name all day and just sit in a bush but say the magic word and they'll come running home.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Dunbal on Wednesday August 31 2016, @08:41PM
I absolutely cannot say the word "cat" without triggering a barking episode and my dogs bolting to the door to look for the damned cat (we had a cat assuming ownership of our back yard for a while - boy did he get a shock every time the door was open). It got so bad that we couldn't even say words that STARTED with "cat", like "category", "cat scan", etc. The dogs would hear "cat" and off they'd go. There are also other words we cannot use unless we mean them - food, hungry and chicken will have my dogs barking their way to the kitchen, car, we have to go, and walk will have them going for their leashes. My "eldest" even understands if I make a little "walking" sign with my fingers (like the yellow pages symbol), it means we're going for a walk and she starts getting excited and goes for the leash.
Dogs are also great on picking up on non verbal cues from us. We live in a condo now and they know the different ring tone between the phone and the intercom. When the intercom rings, they know someone will be coming to the door so they go wait by the door. They never do it when the phone rings. If they see my wife and I putting our shoes on at the same time, they stare at our shoes and then stare at us, waiting to see if they're coming with us (they KNOW shoes mean we are going out). At which point they get told they have to stay, or that "we have to go (for a walk|in the car)".
Dogs are dogs, not people. It's a different kind of intelligence - more focused on the here and how and immediate doggy needs - sleep, food, play, walk, defend, etc. But the intelligence and the ability to communicate is there.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:48AM
I very much agree with all of you on this and not just about dogs or cats or horses or birds. I know of several examples of different types of birds repeatedly utilizing public transportation as shortcuts; magpies inside buses and pigeons inside tube carriages. Plenty of other animals too; sea lions —possibly as intelligent as dogs— and whales and dolphins and even small squids and of course also octopuses. I should add deer, badgers, and foxes for sure as well but to a large degree dependent on how used they are to humans and fairly close coexistence. Those seem to all more or less figure out traffic given enough time and a little luck and I have a strong suspicion they pass on their new instincts or knowledge as best they can. I suspect even insects and closely related lifeforms are quite a bit sharper than we're used to thinking, at least the slightly bigger ones and also (or particularly) spiders in general. Giant weta (a huge insect, 20 cm or so) also seem quite intelligent to me from what (very) little I know of them (I'm not comparing them to dogs or sea lions though).
I understand those who find it exhilarating to search for intelligent life in the universe but the truth is we've never ever been alone.
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(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:09PM
I used to be a cat person until I got a dog, now I have two dogs and no cat...
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday August 31 2016, @09:14PM
Personally I'd put them at about the level of a three year old child for intelligence
I think it's hard to try to compare a dog's intelligence with human intelligence at any age. It's an apples and oranges thing. However I can agree with you that dogs will exhibit some traits that can also be seen in human children. For example my two dogs will behave exactly the same way my kids used to behave with toys or chew-treats, etc. Usually I give them one each. The youngest wants both toys. One each is a foreign concept to them. So the oldest (who is also the dominant one) will choose a toy, and the youngest will completely ignore the other toy and sit in front of her "sister" and growl and whine the whole time, staring at her sister, trying to beg the toy from her. Exactly like my kids - one of my daughters would have a toy she had never played with for the past 6 months but if her sister touched it oh lord "BUT ITS MY TOY I WANT IT SHE'S PLAYING WITH MY TOY!!!"
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Thursday September 01 2016, @10:27AM
My dog would go berserk if you asked him "Where's the Fox?". Once we had some Bulgarian visitors over and I asked them how it translated into Bulgarian. Armed with my new words I tried them on the dog, using the same tone of voice. Again the doggo went berserk. I'm quite positive that my dog did not suddenly learn Bulgarian, or perhaps always knew it. So I'm definitely a little suspicious about this report.
Sure it's an anecdote, but it directly contradicts their experiment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @01:20PM
A lot of commentators here miss the context you provide. The report is about separating out the words from both the tone and context, which they claim to have done. Dogs clearly react to facial expressions, tone, and context (if I pick up his leash and stand by the door, my dog gets very excited about the prospect of a walk regardless of whether I say anything or not). Why they believe they've separated this out is that their brain scans react in ways consistent with processing and understanding the spoken words, where they react differently to nonsense words spoken in the same tones.
I'm particularly impressed with them getting the dogs to lay still in a noisy MRI machine. My dogs wouldn't be so calm.