Dogs Understand More Than What People Thought As They 'Process' Language

Experts have found that dogs, considered as man's best friend, can understand humans more than we thought.

A recent study said that humans' beloved canines can process language in a more nuanced way than what has long been assumed.

Dogs Know How To Process Language

The study involved 18 dog owners who said words for certain toys that they knew their dog will understand. During the test, sometimes owners showed the matching toy while in other cases, they showed an object that did not match the word they were saying.

Researchers then found out that the dogs' brain recordings had a different pattern wherein they were presented with an object that matched the word being said by their owner.

Meanwhile, for the words that the dogs understood to a greater degree, there also appeared to be notable brain waves that have been recorded.

These patterns suggested that dogs are able to associate words with certain objects.

Originally, the researchers predicted that the dog's ability to associate a word with a matching object would depend on them having a wide knowledge of object words. However, their findings suggest that this is not necessarily the case.

Scientists said that it does not really matter how many object words a dog understands because known words activate mental representations anyway.

The study suggested that this ability is generally present within the dogs and they are not just in some exceptional individuals who know the names of many random objects.

What Part Of Dog's Brain

Further, the researchers wanted to understand what parts of the dogs' brains are making these calculations or mental representations.

To understand this, the researchers brought in K9 pets to their lab to study their brain activity. These dogs sat for electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) testing, both of which allowed the dogs to be awake and unrestrained at the course of the study.

Owners trained their dogs to sit still for at least eight minutes for MRI testing. In the EEG tests, researchers applied electrodes to the dogs' heads, let them hang out with their owners, and then played recorded stimuli.

First, they played long streams of speech made up of artificial words, varying the frequency in which these words were played, and sometimes they also played just syllables of words.

Then, they played isolated recordings of each word, and of syllables that did not make up one of the artificial words. The EEG activity showed the dogs were able to tell the difference between both the frequently and infrequently played words.

Further, they could tell the difference between a full word and equally frequently played syllables of words, which is deemed as a more complex distinction.

Dogs then are capable of making complex judgements, and additionally, these distinctions are being made in the same brain regions as humans.