Can Canines Understand What We’re Saying?

Orange County, CA - October 26th, 2018 -  If you say “treat” and your dog gets excited, and runs to the kitchen, does he picture a tasty treat in his mind?

A new study that was published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, used awake-fMRI analyses on participating canine companions. Dr. Gregory Berns and his colleagues from Emory University are one of the first to use brain imaging to examine a dog’s brain. Results showed that dogs can differentiate between words they have been taught, and words they haven’t heard before. At the very least, it suggests that dogs have a basic neurological understanding of the words they’ve been taught and associate it with objects.

 “Many dog owners think that their dogs know what some words mean, but there really isn’t much scientific evidence to support that. We wanted to get data from the dogs themselves—not just owner reports,” said Ashley Prichard, MS, a Ph.D. candidate in Emory’s Department of Psychology, and first author of the study.

Prior to the authors scanning the dogs’ brains to receive that data, they needed to teach them to make a distinction between two toys based on their respective names. Twelve dogs of varying breeds were trained for months by their owners; each dog had two toys. To make it as easy as possible for the dogs to tell the difference between the textures, one toy was soft, and the other was of a different texture, such as rubber. The training entailed instructing the dogs to fetch one of the toys and then rewarding them with praise or food. When a dog proved it can tell the difference between the two toys, by consistently fetching the toy requested by the owner, the training was complete.

Once training was completed, the trained dogs were put in the fMRI scanner, while the owner stood directly in front of the machine. The owners started saying the names of the dog's toys at set intervals, then showed the dog the corresponding toys.

One of the dogs who participated in the study named “Eddie,” a golden retriever-Labrador mix, heard his owner say the words “Monkey” or “Piggy,” then his owner held up the matching toy. The owner then spoke gibberish words, then held up objects like a hat, or a doll.

Can Canines Understand What We’re Saying?

The results showed more activation in auditory regions of the brain to the hat or doll c to the trained words. “We expected to see that dogs neurally discriminate between words that they know and words that they don't. What's surprising is that the result is opposite to that of research on humans -- people typically show greater neural activation for known words than novel words,” says Prichard.

The study authors theorize that dogs may show greater neural activation to an unfamiliar word because they sense that their owners want them to understand what they’re saying. “Dogs ultimately want to please their owners, and perhaps also receive praise or food,” adds Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns, senior author of the study.

Six of the twelve dogs who participated in the study showed the increased activation in their parietotemporal cortex, with the unfamiliar words. Researchers believe it’s similar to the angular gyrus in humans where lexical differences are processed. However, the other six dogs showed heightened activity to the unfamiliar words in other brain regions, which include the other parts of the left temporal cortex and amygdala, the thalamus, and caudate nucleus.

“Dogs may have varying capacity and motivation for learning and understanding human words, but they appear to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they have been taught, beyond just a low-level Pavlovian response,” said Berns.

The researchers acknowledge that the biggest challenge in mapping the cognitive processes of the canines’ brain is the variety of shapes and sizes of dogs' brains across breeds. The varying range in breeds and sizes of the dogs, as well as possible variations in their cognitive abilities, may be why the results are different; causing the limitation of the study.

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Can Canines Understand What We’re Saying? Orange County, CA – October 26th, 2018 –  If you say “treat” and your dog gets excited, and runs to the kitchen, does he picture a tasty treat in his mind? A new study that was published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, used awake-fMRI analyses on participating canine companions. […]