Dog owners often claim that their pet understands it when they speak. A new study suggests that may be true. According to the results of a brain imaging study published by researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Current Biology, the brains of these pets react to voices in the same way that the human brain does.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
Dog owners often claim that their pet understands it when they speak. A new study suggests that may be true. According to the results of a brain imaging study published by the researchers of the Eötvös Loránd University in Current Biology, the brains of these pets react to rumors in the same way that the human brain does.
Even sounds full of emotions, such as the pplant or rice induced similar responses in the two different species, such as human and canine. This is, perhaps, why dogs are attuned to human emotions.
“We think dogs and humans have a very similar mechanism in processing emotional information ", explains Attila Andics, of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Eleven dogs took part in the study; their training took some time.
“We used positive reinforcement strategies - praise for example - continues Andics - There have been 12 preparatory training sessions, then seven sessions in the scanner room, so these dogs were able to remain still for the required 8 minutes. Once trained, they were so happy that I would never have believed it possible if I hadn't seen it ”.
Inside the scanner, both dogs and humans listened 200 recordings of human and canine sounds, including moaning, crying, laughter and yelping. If the speech processing areas of humans reacted more to human voices and those of dogs, conversely, to canine sounds, the researchers they found out that in both species the activities of the involved brain areas were similar depending on the emotional tone of the sound.
Both of them activate a similar region, the temporal pole, which is the most anterior part of the temporal lobe. “We know that dogs are very good at attuning to their owners' feelings, and we know that a good dog owner can detect emotional changes in his dog - but now we begin to understand why“, conclude Andics.
Roberta Ragni
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