Dogs know the names of objects and create expectations

Research with 18 dogs showed that these pets recognize the names of their toys, and the break in expectations also generates changes in brain activity

Dogs can associate words with objects, and thus understand the meaning of certain nouns. This is what a group of experts revealed, whose findings were published in Current Biology. For the study, 18 dogs participated — and their respective owners.

People were instructed to call out the names of their pet’s toys and then hold up an object that was correct or not. Here comes a point that intrigued scientists: the dog’s brain activity changes, depending on whether the toy is the right one or not.

Faced with this incompatibility, the dogs’ brains produced a response that humans present when they hear or read words that do not meet expectations.

This does not happen in vain. Scientists note that the presence of this brain signal proves that dogs activate their memory of an object when they hear its name.

In the statement made by the ELTE Institute of Biology, the authors explain that, as dogs learn instruction words rather than object names, the expectation was that the ability to referentially understand object words would be linked to the number of object words they they use it, but it wasn’t quite like that.

The intelligence of dogs

The statement points out that “no matter how many objective words a dog understands, the known words activate mental representations anyway, suggesting that this ability is generally present in dogs and not just in a few exceptional individuals who know the names of many objects.”

But this is not the first time that the intelligence of these animals has been discussed in scientific literature. Hungarian research even showed that dogs can perceive differences between languages ​​— there were differences in activity patterns in the auditory cortex depending on how they listened to audio from different languages.

Already a publication by Journal of Comparative Psychology went further and made it clear that dogs can think in abstract concepts.

This latest study concludes, then, that “dogs are not just learning a specific behavior from certain words, but can actually understand the meaning of some individual words, just like humans.”

The next objective is to find out whether the ability to understand referential language is specific to dogs or whether it may also be present in other mammals, which should guide future studies in the area.

Source: Current Biology, ELTE

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