Study: Dogs Can Link Words to Objects
A small study of dogs‘ brain waves has revealed that these animals are capable of understanding that certain words refer to specific objects in a manner similar to humans, providing a deeper insight into how the minds of man’s best friends work.
According to Reuters, our four-legged companions will not be able to recognize words that lead to surprising actions for dog owners who ask their pets to “sit” or “fetch” things.
But the study, which analyzed brain activity in 18 dogs, provided evidence that dogs can activate a memory of something when they hear its name. The study was conducted at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and published in the journal “Current Biology.”
Márta Gácsi, who co-authored the study, said: “There has been a long debate about non-human animals’ ability to understand word reference.”
She added, “Despite behavioral reports, it has always been about exceptional cases. Our study is the first to say that this is a family-level ability.”
During the study, dog owners said words that referred to things their pets knew. Then, in some cases, they presented the dog with something that matched the word, while in other cases, the thing did not match.
The results found that the patterns in the dogs‘ brains when words matched objects differed from when there was no match. This resembles what can be observed in humans.
Gácsi said, “Dogs can understand that words symbolize things… so they activate mental representations and link the word’s meaning to mental representation, not just context.”
Researchers plan to study whether this ability to understand referential language is specific to dogs or if it may also exist in other mammals.
