Dogs are smarter than you think
According to a recent study that examined the brain activity of dogs —who are known to react to commands like “sit”—have been observed to create mental images when they hear words associated with objects like balls. According to the researchers, known words still triggered mental representations in dogs, so it made no difference how many object words the dog understood.
They stated that this implied that dogs are generally capable of learning the names of numerous objects, rather than only a select few exceptional dogs.
“Your dog understands more than he or she shows signs of,” said Lilla Magyari from Hungary’s Eötvös Loránd University and co-first author of the study published in the “Current Biology” journal.
“Dogs are not merely learning a specific behaviour to certain words but they might actually understand the meaning of some individual words as humans do,” Magyari said.
According to the researchers, the discovery that dogs might be able to comprehend words generally in the same way that humans do could change how scientists view humans’ superior ability to use and comprehend language.
They added that it has significant ramifications for theories and models of language evolution.
Eighteen dog owners were chosen for the study, and the owners were asked to name toys that their dogs were familiar with.
The dogs’ brain electrical activity was then recorded while they were shown objects, some of which matched the words their owner had said and others did not.
The researchers noted that the brain activity recordings demonstrated patterns that differed depending on whether the dogs were shown matching or non-matching objects. They concluded that this was proof that dogs could comprehend words.
Additionally, they discovered that the brain activity patterns for words that the dogs knew better differed more.
The results contradicted the team’s belief that dogs’ comprehension of language was reliant on their extensive vocabulary of object words.
“Because typical dogs learn instruction words rather than object names, and there are only a handful of dogs with a large vocabulary of object words, we expected that dogs’ capacity for referential understanding of object words will be linked to the number of object words they know; but it wasn’t,” said Magyari.
Now, the researchers want to find out if dogs are the only mammals with this mental representation-based word understanding ability, or if other mammals also possess it.
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