Decoding Canine Comprehension: A Neurological Study

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The article “Your dog really does know what you’re saying, and a brain scan shows how” by the Washington Post describes an experiment conducted by scientists in Hungary that test whether dogs could understand words and the emotions behind them. Dogs are intelligent creatures, capable of following the orders of their owners and displaying strong cognitive abilities. So to test for this, the researchers gathered several family dogs and trained them to sit still for several minutes in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity. For the experiment, a trainer familiar with the dogs spoke words of praise that were commonly used by their owners and neutral words such as “yet” and “if,” that the researchers believed were meaningless to the animals. …show more content…

The researchers investigated whether dogs would respond to certain sounds more strongly than nonvocal sounds like humans and would process the emotional cues of those sounds similarly like humans. The researchers used an fMRI with 11 awake dogs and 22 humans and had the dogs and humans listened to a set of sounds which were human vocalizations, dog vocalizations, nonvocal environmental sounds, and a silent baseline. The results of the experiment showed that dogs and humans had similar processing pathways by using similar regions of the auditory cortex and subcortical regions to process the sounds. The emotional-sensitive regions all responded stronger to positive sounds, but no region responded stronger to negative sounds. The results suggest common functions in dog and human voice processing with acoustical cues related to emotions and are being processed similarly in the dog and human auditory

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