Woof?
Training dogs requires patience, consistency and using gestures or verbal commands, which canines understand through different tones, but new research found they might “listen in” on conversations even if it is not directed at them. Owners often use dog-directed speech (DDS) when speaking with canines. This happy voice, similar to baby talk, occurs when someone uses increased intonation and pitch range. Dogs are more likely to follow commands efficiently when someone uses DDS. But animal experts wanted to test whether dogs could understand and identify meaningful content, such as their name, buried among irrelevant sentences and spoken in a flat tone. The research group prerecorded the dog owners speaking a certain passage. The study, published on April 12 in the journal Animal Cognition, found dogs were more likely to respond to the meaningful phrases when spoken with DDS, however, they could still detect their names among neutral reading prosody. Researchers noted that the dog’s ability to recognize speech could also have been aided by the pauses owners made in their recording. They found that a dog’s brain can sift through speech without exaggerated cues, tones and movements, which previously was believed to be unique to humans. The tests also evaluated the dogs’ response to speech based on gender. While women produce more exaggerated DDS speech than men and compared to their neutral reading speech, the study found that sex did not influence the dogs’ responses.
Dogs can be trained to understand commands, such as “sit,” “stay,” and the ever important “no.” Your dog may also react when you say, “Look at the birds!” running to the window excitedly to get a peek. But what does your dog think of when they hear the word “bird?” Do they actually picture a feathered, winged animal in their mind? Research indicates that dogs understand human emotions and words better than we thought. Does your dog cuddle up to you when you get weepy during a sappy movie? Or jump around in excitement when you’re happy about great news? It often seems like our dogs are in tune with what our emotions and respond in kind. They may try to cheer us up when we’re sad or join us in our celebrations. A study shows that these kinds of reactions are because dogs recognize how we’re feeling. In this research, dogs were shown pictures of people expressing six emotions. The researchers measured the heart rates and stress levels of the dogs as they looked at these different photos. Dogs had a stronger reaction when they viewed fear, anger, and happiness. Their heart rates went up and their stress levels increased. It makes sense that fear and anger would elicit this response since they are heightened emotions that can make a dog feel threatened. Happiness is also an excited state, which helps account for the dogs’ reaction to smiling faces. In addition, dogs may mistake the pulled back lips and bared teeth of a smile as a sign of aggression.
But what does your dog think of when they hear the word “bird?” Do they actually picture a feathered, winged animal in their mind? To find out, a group of researchers conducted a study where they used an fMRI scanner to measure the brain activity of dogs. The study indicated that dogs have a rudimentary neural representation of words they have been taught. Their brains were also more active when they heard unfamiliar words over words they had been taught. This may be due to the fact that our dogs are people-pleasers. They may be focusing hard on the new word in hopes of understanding it, earning our praise, and getting a treat.
Say that again?
When they say “2% milk” I get confused.
I don’t know what the other 98% is!
I’ve just seen the most confusing book…
Ventriloquism for Dummies.
I find this a little confusing: If crime fighters fight crime, and fire fighters fight fire,
what are freedom fighters fighting?
Bigfoot is sometimes confused with Sasquatch,
Yeti never complains.
April 17th Birthdays
1975 – Victoria Beckham, 1972 – Jennifer Garner, 1985 – Rooney Mara, 1970 – Tami Roman
1959 – Sean Bean, 1967 – Henry Ian Cusick, 1985 – Luke Mitchell, 1961 – Boomer Esiason