Remembers things by name
“Understanding a word would mean that the image of a specific object is stored in the dog’s brain. In this case, when the animal hears the word for this object, the well-known event-related potential effect, which can be recorded by electroencephalography, will occur in its brain. Studies of the manifestation of this effect in the human brain have been conducted for a long time, apparently since the 20th century. seventies. They are widely described in the scientific literature. We assumed that the event-related potential effect is also characteristic of the dog brain, and we conducted the corresponding studies”, explains one of the authors of the study, scientist Marianna Boros.
Research conducted at the Lorand Etves University in Budapest, Hungary, measured the brain waves of dogs to prove that they are able to remember an object after hearing its name.
“Dogs understand that some words mean things. They have some abstract thinking to realize that a word can refer to an external thing. Dogs understand nouns and are quite similar to humans in this respect. They use mental images and associate the meaning of the word with a specific image, not only with the context,” says M. Boros.
The human brain works in a similar way
In the study, 18 dog owners named the things their pets knew. They then showed their dogs specific objects that either matched or did not match the nouns.
“Dogs came to the laboratory and not only listened to people talk about things they were not interested in, but also took part in an experiment. The owners brought their favorite toys and showed them to their pets in turn, not allowing them to play with them. Of course the dogs didn’t like it too much as they were told to sit still and not move. It took a little getting tired before the four-legged friends understood what was wanted from them and calmed down when they were separated from their owners. A small briefing had to be given to dog owners as well, since this experiment was a kind of combination of so-called citizen science and traditional science – dog owners had to be experimenters,” says the researcher.
The results of the study showed that the dogs’ brain activity differed when the spoken word matched the object and when it did not. The human brain works in a similar way. The authors of the study plan to find out whether this ability to understand referential language is not only common in dogs, but perhaps also in other mammals.
Tags: scientific study confirmed dogs smarter
