Recent research has determined that the brain of dog can distinguish the voice of its owner of the sound emitted by other dogs, which suggests that they evolved to recognize our voices from theirs, explained Fausto Reyes Delgado, medical director of the UNAM Banfield Veterinary Hospital, regarding an article published in the magazine Science.
What does the study say regarding dog brains?
The study published in Scienceconducted by Anna Bálint, a canine neuroscientist at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, points out that when dogs hear their owners’ voices, they experience a change in brain waves within the first 250 to 650 milliseconds.
In dogs this suggests that they are trying to figure out who or what is making the sound and how to respond, whereas in humans the signal difference in this time frame is associated with motivation and decision making.
To know this, Bálint recruited 17 dogs of the breeds border collie, golden retriever and a German shepherd who he taught to remain still for several minutes at a time, who underwent an electroencephalogram that measures individual brain waves.
Each dog had electrodes attached to its head to record its brain response, which proved difficult as dogs’ heads have many muscles that can obstruct a clear reading.
They then played audio clips of humans and dogs. The human sounds included non-linguistic vocalizations such as babbling, giggling, and baby coughs, while the dog sounds included sniffing, panting, and barking.
Each sound was classified as conveying a positive or neutral emotion, depending on the context in which it was played, such as the howl of a dog playing with a ball.
Study results
The results showed that during the first 250 milliseconds, the dog brains they did not produce any significant signals, the same time that humans process the qualities of sound. That suggests that heThe dogs did not notice that the voices sounded different.
But when the brain waves of dogs peaked in the 250 to 650 millisecond range, these fired differently depending on who they were listening to. Thus, the waves were more electrically positive in response to human vocalizations, and more electrically negative in response to canine sounds.
Reyes Delgado, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), indicated that this study demonstrated “what we already knew, because the specimen [los perros] forever responds differently to human and other canine sounds”.
“All of us who have a dog We know that he relates to all the members of the family in a very important way to interact with everyone, but generally with whom he interacts much more is with whom he is going to understand easily”, added the academic.
For example, when we are in the family nucleus together with the exemplar and he hears the voice in crisis of the person he follows the most, he addresses her; of course they can determine tones, pauses and differentiate between people.
Another case is with protection dogswho receive an order to bite and then must release the person with the voice that gives them the command.
To achieve this they have to differentiate between different tones of voice, the one they know and the unknown ones. This tells us regarding a process of intelligence in terms of language and what they understand.
