Dogs listen to our words, not just our voices. Owners often claim that their pets understand everything they say. Now a new study from the University of Sussex confirms that man's best friends process human language information in a way very similar to ours.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
Dogs listen to our words, not just our voices. Owners often claim that their pets understand everything they say. Now a new study from the University of Sussex confirms that man's best friends process the information of human language in a way very similar to ours, as a previous research had already guessed.
After studying over 250 dogs, trying to understand their responses to a series of voice commands, the team of researchers, led by Victoria Ratcliffe and David Reby, found that, like humans, dogs use different parts of the brain to process the verbal components of a familiar sentence, as well as emotions or intonation.
“Although we can't tell to what extent do they understand the complexity of the verbal content, our study suggests that dogs pay attention to this human language information and perceive the content similar to human perception. We want to see if dogs show these similarities to humans, because they were selected to respond to human verbal commands during domestication, ”explains the researcher.
Humans mainly use the left hemisphere of their brain to process the verbal content of speech and the right hemisphere to process the characteristics of the voice - whether it is family members, male or female - and its emotional content. Previous studies have shown that other mammals use specific areas of the brain when processing their own species' vocalizations, but now they are being investigated. reactions of pets in response to the different components of human language.
In short, if it seems to you that your dog understands you when you talk, you are not crazy. It's really like this. The study was published in Current Biology
Roberta Ragni
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