Analysis of Dogs' Brain Reveals Higher Sensitivity to Women Than Men, Giving Better Understanding to How Their Brains React to Words

(Photo : Unsplash / James Barker)

Dogs have long been known as "man's best friend," but not much study has been delved into how much they listen to women. As such, new research shows that they could actually be listening to women more compared to men.

Exaggerated Speech

The new research came from an Eötvös Loránd University team which applied fMRI scanners to better understand a dog's brain functions when they are being spoken to. The research team found that there was greater brain sensitivity in pups when they heard women speaking.

Anna Gábor, the study's co-first author, said that they noticed an increased dog brain sensitivity in women who were speaking directly to dogs. It was also noted that this could also be because of the level of exaggeration in speech in women compared to men.

Oftentimes when humans talk to infants or dogs, a higher-pitched voice or exaggerated tone is often used to try and get their attention. Studies in the past showed that the brains of an infant are often tuned to this type of speech.

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Dogs' Sensitivity to Speech

Only recently have scientists assessed whether dogs were also sensitive to how they were spoken to. Anna Gergely, another co-first author of the study, described how exciting it was to observe a dog's brain process when it comes to speech directed to them.

The findings could help humans come up with exaggerated prosody that could affect efficient speech processes in nonhuman species. This could also give scientists a better understanding of different speech cues and animals' reactions.

To conduct the study, scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity of the animal. Under observation, the dogs were made to listen to recordings from 24 individuals; half were men while the other half were women.

The speech was dog-directed, infant-directed, and adult-directed. The results showed that the most effective way to communicate was through dog-directed or infant-directed speech. In conclusion, researchers suggested that higher-pitched voices could elicit better responses from dogs.

Talking to Dogs

Dr. Gergely noted that the most interesting part of the research was how dogs' reaction to approach couldn't be explained, unlike infants. The researcher also said that they weren't able to pinpoint why the dogs reacted that way, be it either conspecific signals or if they were more reactive to women's voices in general.

The doctor also pointed out that voice tone patterns when it came to women's speech directed to dogs weren't typically used when dogs communicate with each other. One suggestion for the findings was that dogs developed this type of neural preference because of domestication.

The study is still the first of its kind when it comes to providing neural evidence of how dogs react to the way they are spoken to. Further study is still required to properly understand the effect of how dogs are spoken to with different tones or from different genders.