Dogs Understand You

By Victoria Robertson on August 31, 2016

Man’s best friend might be able to understand you? Well, maybe not understand you per se, but understand what you mean to tell them.

It’s really not that shocking for dog owners. For everyone else, this is potentially ground-breaking science.

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Many dog owners have treated their best friends as such throughout their lives — most dogs are considered family members in many respects. So I suppose it only makes sense that they can understand us just as well. At least, in our meaning.

According to a recent study conducted by scientists from Hungary, it’s not only what you say, but the way you say it that communicates to your pet. Now, intonation, gestures, expressions, etc. all matter when speaking to your pet, as they can most likely understand all of that.

The scientists scanned the brains of dogs while simultaneously playing their trainer’s voice. The scans revealed that dogs “experience a sense of reward” when the tone of their trainer and the intonation suggest the dog is being praised.

On top of this, the study also found that dogs actually process speech much like humans. This means that words that are more meaningful are processed in the left hemisphere of their brain while intonation is processed in their right hemisphere.

According to lead researcher, Attila Andics, “The results were very exciting and surprising.”

The researchers trained about 13 dogs for months in order to get them to remain motionless while they were run through an fMRI machine. This is how the scientists were able to gather this data. The process is explained entirely in the journal “Science.”

Researchers looked at the brain activity of dogs to see how it changed before and after the recordings of their trainers’ voices.

There were a total of four recordings: praise or neutral and high-pitched intonation or neutral intonation.

The praise included words such as “well done!” and the neutral included words such as “however” or “nevertheless.”

Realistically, these are words dogs rarely hear, or that are at the very least rarely directed at them.

According to the results, praise words resulted in higher left hemisphere activity for both types of intonation. This suggests that humans and dogs utilize the left brain to process words that are recognizable and that meaning is attached to.

On the other hand, there wasn’t that much left hemisphere activity related to the neutral words. Instead, differences in intonation (not the word itself) resulted in right hemisphere changes, specifically in the auditory region of the hemisphere.

According to Andics:

“It is actually the very same part of the brain in this right auditory brain region that we found in dogs and also humans in an earlier study that responds to the emotional content of a sound. It is not a mechanism that is only there for language stimuli, it is the same mechanism dogs use for processing emotional sounds in general.”

Dogs also have what’s known as a “reward centre” in their brain, which is the region that responds to pleasure — specifically activities or experiences that they get pleasure from.

And, to no one’s surprise, this region only has increased activity when praise is used both in words and in intonation.

According to Andics, “From this research, we can quite confidently say if they only hear you then it is not only how you say things but also what you say that matters to them.”

Of course, all this isn’t to say that dogs completely understand you. That’s to say, dogs don’t necessarily know what the words are, they just understand the feelings associated with them.

And it’s important also to note that body language, facial expressions and other such cues factor into how a dog responds.

According to Andics:

“The neural mechanism humans have for processing meaning in speech, so for processing word meaning and intonation, are not uniquely human — they seem to be there in other species … It is not the result of a special new neural mechanism but the result of an innovation. We invented words as we invented the wheel.”

While for many dog owners, this information is nothing more than noise (especially since, for a long time, dog owners have treated their pets like people regardless), for others, it’s extremely important.

This shows us that dogs can understand meaning, so it would stand to reason that this knowledge can expand throughout other animal species. I think it’s only a matter of time before we start testing cats and other household pets.

While it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, this news is important in understanding our K-9 friends’ point of view.

So if nothing else, we can be thankful for that.

In the meantime, we’ll continue treating our dogs like our best friends. Because no matter what, that’s what they’ll always be to us, while we have them and long after they’re gone.

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