A study, reported this Friday in the magazine Current Biology, has proven that when dogs hear words that represent objects they know, they activate the corresponding mental representation in their minds.
The researchers, affiliated with universities in Hungary and Norway, had 18 dog owners say words for toys that their dogs knew and then present them with the objects.
Sometimes they showed the corresponding toy, while other times they showed him something that was not, for example, an owner called his dog and said “the ball”, and presented him with the ball.
Other times they told him the name but they presented him with an object that was not that ball to see how he reacted, while the researchers recorded his brain activity with a non-invasive test,
The request was made without asking them to act to focus on their understanding of the language.
They understand more than it seems
The results of the brain recordings of the 18 dogs in these tests showed a different pattern in the brain when the dogs were shown an object that matched the mentioned word with another that did not.
The dogs’ response is similar to what researchers have observed in humans and is widely accepted as evidence that they understand words.
The researchers also observed a common pattern in the words the dogs knew best, corroborating their understanding of the objects.
Although they initially thought that this word recognition ability required broader vocabulary knowledge, their findings have shown that this is not the case.
“Dogs not only react with learned behavior to certain words but also activate a memory of an object when they hear its name,” says Marianna Boros, an Ethology researcher at the Eotvos Lorand University of Budapest in a statement from this center.
“It doesn’t matter how many object words a dog understands: familiar words activate mental representations anyway, suggesting that this ability is present across the board in all dogs and not just in a few exceptional individuals who know the names of many objects.” “, Add.
Can it be extended to other animals?
According to the researchers, the discovery that dogs, as a species, can understand words referentially, just like humans, may change the way scientists think regarding the uniqueness of how humans use and understand language.
“Dogs are not limited to learning specific behavior for certain words, but might actually understand the meaning of some individual words like humans do,” they point out.
Researchers now want to know if this ability to understand referential language is specific to dogs or may also be present in other mammals, in addition to deciphering how this ability arose and whether it depends on dogs’ unique experience of living with people.
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