Dog Brains Are a Lot Like Ours
Study leader and dog lover Attila Andics started studying canines as a way to understand how the mammalian brain processes language.
The first step was not an easy one: Training dogs to remain absolutely still in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. It took several months for dog trainers to work their magic on 13 pet dogs that live in Hungary, including six border collies, four golden retrievers, one German shepherd, and one Chinese crested.
“The hardest part was getting them to understand that they needed to lie absolutely still. Once they realized that we meant completely still, it worked out great,” says Andics, an ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. (See “Can Dogs Feel Our Emotions? Yawn Study Suggests Yes.”)
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
In 2014, Andics and colleagues showed how the brains of the same 13 dogs respond to various vocalizations, like grunts, barks, whines, and shouts, from both people and other dogs. Happy and fearful sounds activated similar brain areas in both species, their study found.
Speech, however, was different. “There’s nothing in nature that’s as complex as human speech,” said Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London who wasnt part of the new study.
So with the same group of 13 dogs, Andics and colleagues played recordings of their owners talking in four different ways: A praising word (such as the Hungarian word for “clever” or “that’s it”) in a praising tone, a neutral word in a neutral tone, a praising word in a neutral tone, and a neutral word in a praising tone.
His neuroimaging results showed that the left hemisphere of the dogs’ brains responded to the word itself, and that their right hemisphere responded to intonation. (See “5 Amazing Stories of Devoted Dogs.”)
However, it took both a praise word and a praising tone to activate the dog’s reward center. In other words, your pet knows when you’re praising them and you actually mean it.
“For some dogs, praise might be enough to get them to do what you want. In this study, we treated our dogs like happy volunteers who wanted to please us,” Andics said.
The key to good dog behavior, then, is letting your pet know that they really are a good dog.
Follow Carrie Arnold on Twitter.
For humans, single-sound differences are a huge part of everyday language and communication. In fact, human children learn to make these phonetic distinctions during their second year of life, which is when their vocabulary begins expanding dramatically. Until they’re roughly a year old, babies are unable to make such distinctions between similar-sounding words. So, this study suggests that most dogs process human language in a way that is more similar to young babies than to older babies and toddlers.
Dogs’ brains are able to make clear distinctions between a word they already know and a nonsense word that’s very different from the known word. However, the study showed that they did not discriminate between the word they knew and a similar-sounding nonsense word. For example, their brains responded differently to hearing words like down and surf, but not to hearing words like down and dune, which differ by only one sound. For anyone who has ever had their dog confuse cues such as stand and stay, or toys such as boat and goat, these findings make a lot of sense.
Karen B. London, Ph.D. is a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist and Certified Professional Dog Trainer who specializes in working with dogs with serious behavioral issues, including aggression. Karen writes the animal column for the Arizona Daily Sun and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of six books about canine training and behavior, including her most recent, Treat Everyone Like a Dog: How a Dog Trainer’s World View Can Improve Your Life
The way words are processed in the brains of dogs who have a massive vocabulary could explain their special skills. It may be that such dogs are especially good at processing sounds, and it’s this talent that allows them to learn so many different words. Perhaps if dogs have the ability to distinguish large numbers of words and sounds, their vocabulary can grow quickly.
Dogs who are able to identify hundreds—or even thousands—of toys by name are really rare. That’s why they make the news and books are written about them. Most dogs are not nearly as skilled at discriminating among so many different words, or learning what they mean.
The development of executive functions occurs slowly over the course of childhood. As they get older, children get better at organizing their thoughts and controlling their behaviours and emotions. In fact, humans are the only known species to develop advanced executive functions, although other species like birds, primates and dogs have rudimentary executive functions similar to young children.
Write an article and join a growing community of more than 157,500 academics and researchers from 4,532 institutions.
Sophie Jacques previously received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
In 2015, I began a collaboration with psychologist Catherine Reeve, at the time a graduate student working on dogs’ scent detection abilities. Our goal was to develop a similar measure of vocabulary for use with dog owners that we could then use to examine links between language and executive functions.
We found that, on average, service dogs respond to about 120 words, whereas family pets respond to about 80 words, ranging between 15 to 215 words across all dogs. We also found that certain breed groups, such as herding dogs like border collies and toy dogs like chihuahuas, respond to more words and phrases than other breed types like terriers, retrievers and mixed breeds.
Can my pet understand what I’m saying?
Sophie Jacques previously received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Humans are unique in their ability to develop sophisticated language abilities. Language allows us to communicate with each other and live in complex societies. It is key to our advanced cognitive abilities and technological prowess.
As a developmental psychologist, I have extensively studied the role of language in children’s cognitive development, especially their executive functions – the cognitive skills that allow them to control their behaviour, plan for the future, solve difficult problems and resist temptation.
The development of executive functions occurs slowly over the course of childhood. As they get older, children get better at organizing their thoughts and controlling their behaviours and emotions. In fact, humans are the only known species to develop advanced executive functions, although other species like birds, primates and dogs have rudimentary executive functions similar to young children.
In humans, our ability to develop executive functions has been linked to our language development. Language permits us to form and hold representations of our goals and plans in mind, allowing us to govern our behaviour over the long term.
What is not clear is whether language actually causes the emergence of executive functions, and whether the relation between language and executive functions exists only in humans.
For humans, studying dogs offers the perfect opportunity to consider these questions. First, dogs possess rudimentary executive functions. These can be measured in a variety of ways, including asking owners about their dogs’ ability to control their behaviours, as well as behavioural tests designed to assess dogs’ control abilities.
Second, not only do we expose dogs regularly to human language, but research also indicates that dogs can perceive different words and can learn to respond to specific words. For example, three dogs — two border collies named Chaser and Rico, and a Yorkshire terrier named Bailey — learned to respond to over 1,000, 200 and 100 words, respectively.
However, many dog language studies have been limited in scope, either examining the word-based responses of only one or a small sample of dogs, or the responses of multiple dogs but only to select words.
One exception was a study in which 37 dog owners were asked to list words they believed their dogs responded to consistently. Owners reported that their dogs responded to an average of 29 words, although this likely is an underestimation. Indeed, research using a similar free-recall approach with parents shows that they are prone to forget many words when asked to generate lists of words to which their babies respond consistently.
Research with human infants does provide a solution for systematically and reliably assessing word-based responding in large samples of dogs. Arguably the best and most widely used measure of early language abilities of infants is the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, a parent-report checklist of words responded to consistently. Remarkably, the number of words selected on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory predicts children’s language development years later.
In 2015, I began a collaboration with psychologist Catherine Reeve, at the time a graduate student working on dogs’ scent detection abilities. Our goal was to develop a similar measure of vocabulary for use with dog owners that we could then use to examine links between language and executive functions.
We developed a list of 172 words organized in different categories (for example, toys, food, commands, outdoor places) and gave it to an online sample of 165 owners of family and professional dogs. We asked them to select words that their dogs responded to consistently.
We found that, on average, service dogs respond to about 120 words, whereas family pets respond to about 80 words, ranging between 15 to 215 words across all dogs. We also found that certain breed groups, such as herding dogs like border collies and toy dogs like chihuahuas, respond to more words and phrases than other breed types like terriers, retrievers and mixed breeds.
What we don’t yet know is whether dogs who respond to more words also have better executive functions. We recently assessed 100 dogs on a behavioural measure of executive functions and had their owners identify words on our vocabulary checklist. We are now analysing the results.
I first became interested in studying dogs to see what they might tell us about child development. That said, this research might also provide important practical information about dogs. For example, it is very expensive to train puppies for service work and many do not make the final cut. However, if early word-based responding abilities predict later behavioural and cognitive abilities, our measure could become an early and simple tool to help predict which dogs are likely to become good service animals.
Write an article and join a growing community of more than 157,500 academics and researchers from 4,532 institutions.