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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 rleigh on Wednesday August 31 2016, @11:09PM
There has been evidence for years of dogs with a specific vocabulary of over several hundred nouns. They can comprehend nouns and verbs (well, the more intelligent breeds at least). I think of them as being similar to a three year old child. While there are the simple commands you train them to obey (sit, stay etc.), I'm sure their understanding of general conversation can be far greater from my obervations of their behaviour when discussing things in general conversion. It's not that surprising though--the brain structures of all higher mammals are sufficiently complex to allow it; the main determination I think is the species' desire to interact and cooperate with us. In being part of our social/family structure, they have an intrinsic need to fit in and learn and obey orders from those higher in their perceived pecking order.
What I find more interesting/amusing/frustrating is that they have the intelligence to deliberately "misunderstand", ignore or prevaricate when you tell them to do something they don't want to do/can't be bothered to do. They certainly aren't mindless automatons, and depending upon the individual can have a large independent steak. My current collie cross was very good at "selective hearing" of instructions; now he's 16 and going deaf it's legit but a decade ago it was clearly deliberate when he was more interested in doing his own thing than obeying me! Another one I remember is when walking my old collie. I would always say "sit" before crossing a road, and she was obedient about doing it and eventually got so used to this she would often do it automatically without being instructed. One time she wouldn't sit, and just looked at me, refusing to do it. After a few times, I said firmly "sit down now", and she slowly and reluctantly sat down... into a deep puddle I hadn't noticed! Oops. Obviously wanted to obey me and did when I insisted but was also thinking a step ahead to the consequences!