SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by ese002 on Wednesday August 31 2016, @09:41PM
I don't think this test demonstrates that the dogs understand the meaning of words. It may simply mean that they pick up the difference between speaking sense from speaking nonsense. It could be subtle differences in tone that human ears fail to notice or it could be random word sequencing. A better test would be to replace words one-for-one with specific made up words or perhaps to speak in a different language that the dogs have never been exposed to.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday September 01 2016, @04:05AM
Eh? If you speak to me in made up words or a different language I have never been exposed to I wouldn't understand it either... does that mean I don't understand the meaning of words?
I do believe dogs can associate meaning, in their terms, to words. I have a dog that understands well enough when I speak to her. Sure maybe when I say walk time, it doesn't necessarily mean walk time as defined in human terms, it could mean going out to sniff around time to her, but the point is they are smart enough to associate meaning to words that makes sense on their terms.
(Score: 2) by TGV on Thursday September 01 2016, @08:03AM
What he could mean is: it is possible to train e.g. a neural network to distinguish between words and non-words. That doesn't mean the network knows what the words mean. It's just capable of picking up some regularity in words that doesn't occur in made up words. And I very much doubt that this study has tried all kinds of different ways to construct non-words, so indeed, it's a rather useless addition to what we already suspected, and it doesn't shed any light on how dogs recognize or remember words.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Friday September 02 2016, @12:49AM
If you speak to me in made up words or a different language I have never been exposed to I wouldn't understand it either.
You (and the dog) aren't suppose to understand. Speaking in another language replaces speaking nonsense.
The experiment compared two conditions:
1) Speaker speaks in a language that the dog has been exposed to.
2) Speaker speaks nonsense
The experiment showed a different pattern for the first than the second. But we don't know if the dog understood the first case or if it simply understood that there was sense to the first case and not the second.
I propose to change the second case.
1) Speaker speaks in a language that the dog has been exposed to.
2) Speaker speaks in a language that the dog has not been exposed to.
Like the original experiment, where the speaker spoke nonsense, the dog will not understand when spoken to in a language it has not been exposed to. However, there is intrinsic sense to the words and they make sense to the speaker. If the dog can only distinguish sense from nonsense, the brain scan should be the same for #1 and #2. If they are different then we have better evidence that the dog understands the meaning of the words in the first case.