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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: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:18PM
Don't tell me the typical dog doesn't know what "bath", "ride", and "walk" mean.
My dog's a complete ditz. "Wanna go for a walk?" I ask her, every time. Blank look, every time.
She knows perfectly well what "sit" means, but only does it when she can see a reward in front of her.
The old dog was a bit smarter. Still did his own thing most of the time, but at least he knew what a walk was, and that "wait" meant stop.
Two incidents stand out as indications of what was going on his little brain. He never liked other dogs, and sometimes got snappy with them. One day he really went for some poor mutt who'd nothing to him. I shouted at him, held him down (gently) and made sure he knew he'd been bad. When I let him up, he jogged on ahead so I snapped his name. He spun round... and slid backwards off the wall of the coastal walk we were following. Luckily it wasn't far, but his face was so "what the hell happened?!" I'm pretty sure he associated it with snapping at that dog, and from that day on he never once so much as growled at another dog.
Another time my friend and I took him to the beach. He didn't like the sea - his legs were too short to make him a decent swimmer - so he stayed on the sand. But he also hated being left on his own. We were only a few feet out, but he started running up and down and barking. And then he started jumping up and down, pounding the sand with his front paws and staring intently at it. My friend's theory was that he was trying to get us to come out of the water to play the new awesome dry game he'd just invented.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Wednesday August 31 2016, @08:12PM
I don't know: your dog sounds pretty smart to me. She gets you to "pay" for her to sit.
(Score: 2) by dbe on Thursday September 01 2016, @12:21AM
Have your tried the stupid dog test?
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/07/dog.html [blogspot.com]
Whether or not you are a dog owner, if you have 10 minutes, i would recommend you read it, it's hilarious.
-dbe