Dogs Understand Us Better Than We Think
How
Do Dogs Understand Humans
Even if the dog owners sometimes feel misunderstood,
their four-legged friends listen to them carefully. The
inclination of the dog's head reveals what he knows - emotion or
meaning.
German Shepherd in Stylish Dog Collar
Dogs
perceive language, according to researchers, quite similar as we
humans. Who says what and how? All this information is contained
in a word or phrase that you can hear from the human language.
Different language components such as the meaning of the words
or their emphasis will be processed in different halves of the
brain, - this was mentioned by British scientists' report in the
"Current Biology" journal.
Belgian
Malinois
Studded Harness
Victoria
and David Ratcliffe Reby from the University of Sussex Falmer
had played the sounds in different experiments for each of 25
dogs, for both their ears simultaneously. In general the
speakers emphasized a part of the language particularly strong,
mainly the meaningful portions of a command or the information
for the dog about the speaker and his mood. Then they observed
the direction, in which the dog turned his head. This allowed
the conclusions to be drawn, in which half of the brain, called
hemisphere, the individual speech components were processed.
Emotion
or Meaning?
"The
input of the ears is transmitted for the most part in the
respective opposite hemisphere of the brain," said Ratcliffe.
"When a hemisphere is specialized for the processing of certain
information components, then that is perceived as if they come
from the opposite ear." If a dog looks so after a certain sound
to the left, that is to say that the stuck information is
processed mainly in the right hemisphere.
In the
first experiment, the researchers, for example, emphasized the
meaningful components of the expression "come on then" ("Well,
go!"). 80 percent of the dogs turned their heads then to the
right. This tends to suggest that the meaningful language
elements are processed in the left hemisphere. The researchers
then increased, however, the emotional stress of a command,
turned a lot of the dogs head to the left - these language
components are thus processed more in the right hemisphere, the
scientists conclude.
German Shepherd with Designer Dog Harness
"This is
particularly interesting, because the results suggest that
language processing in the dogs' brain goes in two halves of the
brain and thus is divided very similar to humans' brain
processes," said Reby. That does not mean that dogs understand
everything that a person says.
Whether
similar language processing between man and dog is a consequence
of domestication and whether it is similar in other domestic and
wild animals, it should be further investigated.
