Hungarian researchers say they’ve proven that dogs understand a lot more than we think.The experiment counted on the cooperation of 13 dogs, mainly border collies and golden retrievers. They were trained to lie still for 7 minutes during a functional MRI scan.
Wearing headphones, the dogs listened as trainers combined phrases with different intonations. Brain scans revealed that, like humans, dogs processed words with the left side of their brains and used the right side to process pitch.
The study showed that a division in the dog’s brain between meaning and sound. So, they’re hearing the pitch of what we say, but they’re also attending at some level to the meaning, especially to familiar words. The results also showed that dogs only recognized praise if both the words and tone were positive.
Researchers suggest that the mechanisms to process language are not unique to humans and evolved earlier than previously believed.
Critics of this study say a lot more testing needs to be done before any conclusions are made.
