A new study suggests that dogs understand a lot more than you think

Scientists have made an extraordinary discovery: dogs may have the ability to associate words with objects.

Dog owners have known this, of course, for some time: You can easily train a dog to respond to certain words. New research now shows that dogs may be several times smarter than previously proven. Dogs also have the ability to make an association between words and things, even if they don't always act accordingly. Scientist Mariana Boros contributed to the research. “We discovered that dogs cannot respond to certain words solely by displaying learned behavior,” she explains. “We also discovered that dogs understand that certain words represent things, and that they also activate memories associated with those things.” The research has been published in the journal Current biology.

Dog brain
In the research, scientists used electroencephalography (EEG), or a brain scan in which brain activity is recorded. Scientists had good reasons to use a brain scanner: Previous studies often looked at active procedures to determine intelligence. The dogs heard the name of an object and then checked to see if the dogs caught that object as well. But the percentage of dogs that eventually picked up the correct object in these trials indicated that they did so by chance rather than consciously. Thus the experiments seemed to indicate that the dogs were not actually able to associate the name of the object with that object. But was that true? To clarify this once and for all, the researchers decided to use more sensitive research tools and methods in their new study in order to learn more about the subtle intelligence of dogs.

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A total of 18 different dog owners participated in this study. The dog owners were then asked to name a toy their dog knew. Shortly thereafter, the dog owners had to hold something up in front of the window so their dog could see the object. Now the most interesting part of the research: Dogs' brains send different signals when an heard word matches something in their field of vision than when it doesn't. In other words, when the owner showed his dog a ball and said “ball” at the same time, the scientists saw a different signal appear on the brain scan than when the owner described the same object as something else.

Concept
However, what makes this observation even more special is that the same difference in brain activity can also be found in humans. In science, this is now a proven way to check whether the brain understands something or not.

A large vocabulary is not necessary
The brain activity that dogs showed when they heard the name of an object and then found that object clearly deviates from the brain activity they showed when the name of the object they heard did not belong to the object described. The researchers concluded that the better the dogs knew the name of the object, the greater the difference. What was also striking was that the researchers saw this difference in brain activity not only in dogs with large vocabularies, but also in dogs that did not know many names of objects. Fellow scientist and team member Leila Magyari also contributed to the study. “Normally, dogs learn primarily ‘instruction words’ rather than object names,” she says. We expected that the ability to recognize these object names was related to the number of object names the dogs already knew. But what we discovered is that this was not the case; All names of known objects can trigger a mental representation of that object. This suggests that the ability to recognize objects exists in all types of dogs, not just in specific individuals who know a lot of words.

Use of language
The study's findings are particularly important because they affect the way scientists view intelligence and language use. Ultimately, this will have an impact on the various models that attempt to describe the evolution of language. In addition, according to scientists, it is also important for dog owners to realize that their dog is smarter than they initially thought. “It's true that your dog understands more than he shows,” Magyari explains. Dogs don't just learn to respond to words by displaying certain behaviors; They can also understand the meaning of some words, just as humans can.

However, according to the researchers, a number of questions remain open. They are very curious about how this ability appears. They also wonder whether other animal species share the same recognition skills. Finally, it is still unknown how dogs have difficulty responding effectively to object names, while simultaneously recognizing and understanding these object names.