Dogs Process Language Like Us, but What Do They Understand?

Does this excellent dog understand you? Credit: MACMILLAN AUSTRALIA

If you’re speaking to me, it’s not just what you say but how you say it that matters. A new study published this week in Science finds that dogs also pick up on these important, yet separate details. And there's more. Not only does this study add to our knowledge of how dogs attend to human language, it also raises important questions about the difference betweenprocessing human speech and understanding it.

For the last few years, Attila Andics and his colleagues in Hungary (Family Dog Project Facebook, Twitter) are one of a handful of research groups training companion dogs to voluntarily go into an fMRI. Once in, the dogs are presented with different stimuli as their brains go under the giant figurative microscope. 

In the recent study, dogs heard both familiar praise words and neutral words presented with a praising or neutral tone. The researchers found that, like us, dog brains separate out the vocabulary bits from the intonation, processing familiar words in the left hemisphere and intonation in auditory regions of the right, a finding that corroborates and extends earlier behavioral studies. The conclusion, according to Science, is that "dogs seem to understand both human words and intonation."

Your dog, your words?

Before discussing this with your dog — "I knew you could understand me this whole time!" — the caveat to this research is that a dog processingwords — registering, "Ah! That’s familiar!" — and a dog understandingwords as you intend are not necessarily the same thing. 

Adam Miklosi, one of the study’s authors and head of the Family Dog Project weighs in over email, "'Understanding' is a tricky word. Studies using brain imaging technology cannot firmly say that the activation of a specific brain area indicates 'understanding.' For sure, dogs in this study reacted to the meaningful words, that is, to those words that their owners often use when they want to attract the dog's attention or provide a positive feedback for the dog. So in this sense our dogs recognized these words as familiar and probably meaning something good."

Could dogs understand our words as we intend? Good gosh of course! Just look at Chaser the Border Collie who knows the unique name for over 1,000 different objects, her wordy prowess tested and documented in twoscientific publications. Chaser knows the difference between the many toys and objects in her life, that Acorn is not Crybaby, and that Slug is different from Tie Face. She can also perform different actions towards the objects, like fetch, tease, and tug. Chaser’s left hemisphere is on fire.

Miklosi would probably agree: "The other important aspect of [our] study is that the left brain of the dogs processed the meaningful wordsindependent from the intonation. This means that the brain could probably recognize that 'good dog' is the same expression independent of how it was said."

But for understanding, remember that Chaser and dogs like her have undergone many hours of training with words and

Dog Intelligence and What It Can Tell Us about Our Own Intelligence

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If you’re a true dog lover, you take it as one of life’s simple truths that all dogs are good, and you have no patience for scientific debate over whether dogs really love people. Of course they do. What else could explain the fact that your dog runs wildly in circles when you get home from work, and, as your neighbors report, howls inconsolably for hours on end when you leave? What else could explain the fact that your dog insists on sleeping in your bed, under the covers—in between you and your partner? At the same time, there’s no denying that some dogs are smarter than others. Not all dogs can, like a border collie mix named Jumpy, do a back flip, ride a skateboard, and weave through pylons on his front legs.   

A study published in the journal Intelligence by British psychologists Rosalind Arden and Mark Adams confirms as much. Consistent with over a century of research on human intelligence, Arden and Adams found that a dog that excels in one test of cognitive ability will likely excel in other tests of cognitive ability. In more technical terms, the study reveals that there is a general factor of intelligence in dogs—a canine “g” factor.

For their study, Arden and Adams devised a battery of canine cognitive ability tests. All of the tests revolved around—you guessed it—getting a treat. In the detour test, the dog’s objective was to navigate around barriers arranged in different configurations to get to a treat. In the point-following test, a researcher pointed to one of two inverted beakers concealing a treat, and recorded whether the dog went to that beaker or the other one. Finally, the quantity discrimination test required the dog to choose between a small treat (a glob of peanut butter) and a larger one (the “correct” answer). Arden and Adams administered the battery to 68 border collies from Wales; all had been bred and trained to do herding work on a farm, and thus had similar backgrounds.

Just as humans will differ in their scores on intelligence tests, the dogs differed in their performance on the tests. Some of the dogs aced the tests; others struggled. The maze version of the detour test was especially tricky for some of the dogs. In this test, the dog had to navigate through a maze and then crawl through a plastic tube to get the treat. While the best performer took just 3 seconds to complete this task, the worst took nearly 2 minutes. Moreover, scores on the tests tended to correlate positively with one another, implying the existence of a canine g factor. For example, a dog that did well in the quantity discrimination test, consistently preferring the larger glob of peanut better to the smaller one, tended to do well in the pointing test, consistently going where the researcher pointed.

This research suggests that neural mechanisms underlying variation in intelligence may be similar across the animal kingdom. Other researchhas found evidence for a g factor in mice and monkeys; there are even hints of g in insects. On a more practical level, this research is important for understanding the link between intelligence and health in humans. Research has convincingly established that scores on intelligence tests predict health outcomes. A high IQ is associated with good health and a long life. However, interpretation of this finding is complicated by the fact that IQ may also correlate with “confounding” behaviors such as drinking and smoking. Because dogs refrain from these behaviors, research on canine intelligence can give scientists a more accurate estimate of the relationship between health and intelligence. This is yet another way that dogs are our best friends.

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Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Gareth, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, is the series editor of Best American Infographics and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.