PAWS FOR THOUGHT Your Dog Understands More Than You Think
Dog lovers have long known their pets take cues from their owners’ tone of voice and body language. But canines’ ability to understand spoken words alone, without other cues, has been debated. A new study published in the journal Current Biology shows that dogs recognize the spoken names of familiar objects independent of their owner’s body language, visual cues, or tone of voice. The study broke new ground by showing that dogs can have a higher level of abstract understanding than shown previously. In the study, scientists attached electrodes to the heads of 18 dogs and used electroencephalogram (EEG) machines to measure brain waves. Then, they played recordings of each pet’s owner saying the names of familiar objects, such as “Here’s the ball.” The owner would then appear behind a window and show the dog an object — either the item named in the recording or a different one. The EEGs enabled researchers at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, to track the dogs’ neural activity and compare their reaction to seeing an object they expected to see with their reaction to seeing an unrelated object. When the word used, and the object in the owner’s hand matched, the dogs’ brains showed less activity. When they did not match, the dogs knew
something was off-base, and this dissonance showed up in the EEGs. The dogs were tested on recognizing various simple objects, including a wallet, phone, and leash.
Some dogs can learn words, as demonstrated by the famous South Carolina border collie Chaser. Her owner, a psychologist named John Tilley, taught her to recognize the names of 1,000 different toys. Tilley said Chaser learned like a child through inference and positive reinforcement. Still unresolved is whether dogs can understand many words but have no way to show it. Even with the tools of modern neuroscience, we have no way to truly understand everything happening in the canine brain.
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