Brain Scans Suggest Dogs Might Not Actually Understand What You Say To Them

Dogs are considered man's best friend, and for over 30,000 years, they have co-existed together. More than ever, the dogs have become more popular as they have become a common fixture in more than 50% of American households.

Humans talk to their dogs as if they understand each word being spoken to them. Dogs may have recognized some of these words, but a new study suggests that they are actually missing more words.

Brain scans reveal that dogs do not understand all the words they hear, which means that the number of words they are familiar with remains lesser than humans realize.

Dogs fail to distinguish differences between words

ScienceAlert reported that despite dogs' excellent hearing and analytical abilities, they might have missed the subtle differences between similar-sounding words. But their limited capacity to understand all the words remains unclear.

Researchers from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, explained that "while dogs have remarkable abilities for social cognition and communication, the number of words they learn to recognize typically remains very low."

The researchers measure the brain activity of dogs to probe the limitations in their auditory vocabulary. They used the non-invasive procedure called electroencephalography (ECG) on 40 dogs.

While EEG electrodes are attached to the dogs' scalp, the researchers played three different voice recordings, which are the familiar instruction words like 'sit,' also the phonetically similar nonsense words like 'sut,' and dissimilar nonsense words like 'bep.'

On a subset of 17 animals that are deemed reliable, the EEG results revealed that there is a clear difference in the brain responses of dogs, called the event-related potentials (ERPs), when the dogs hear familiar words or dissimilar-sounding nonsense words.

Based on the ERPs, the overall results revealed that the dogs could not distinguish between the familiar instructions and the similar-sounding instructions given that the words almost sound alike.

Dogs Fail to Overcome their Limitations in Phonetics

The EEG results revealed the dogs' limitations in overcoming hurdles of phonetics, and researchers said that this is not a consequence of inadequate perceptual discrimination, Unfold Times reported. On the other hand, this could show how animals focus their consideration.

For example, the infants and the researchers noted that infants are like dogs who fail to discriminate the very similar-sounding phrases. But unlike dogs, infants go on later in life to study to differentiate the slight variations on the phonetics. This is what underlies the human capability to know massive vocabularies.

Since dogs are unlike humans, they do not get past that previous and fail to concentrate on all the speech spoken to them. That is why dogs only study limited human phrases. Also, it implies that they do not perceive people as much as what humans previously believed.

The dogs may have been confused with the similar-sounding phrases, and their brains may have interpreted these words as identical.

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