Dogs can actually understand humans.
Dogs can understand humans
A new study has carried out by Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary found that canines are capable of associating a certain object with a word and brain activity recordings suggest they activate a matching mental representation in their minds.
First author Dr. Marianna Boros said: “Dogs do not only react with a learned behavior to certain words.
“They also don’t just associate that word with an object based on temporal contiguity without really understanding the meaning of those words, but they activate a memory of an object when they hear its name.”
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, analyses what words or phrases dogs understand by measuring brain activity using non-invasive Electroencephalography (EEG) without asking them to act.
As part of the research, the team had 18 dog owners say words for toys that their dogs were familiar were with and charted how they reacted at each instance.
Co-first author Professor Lilla Magyari said: “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.”
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