Do dogs understand humans?

For thousands of years, dogs have remained human's closest friends. They live and work with us and even become members of our families, but do they understand our words and emotions? For a long time, despite the claims of dog breeders to the contrary, scientists believed that when a dog looks like it understands its owner, it is only demonstrating a learned pattern of behavior, and its owner simply attributes human qualities to it. However recent research has raised the question again whether dogs understand humans and human speech.

Research on cognitive processes in dogs

Despite the fact that mankind knows a long and close relationship between humans and dogs, the study of the processes of thinking and information processing in dogs is a fairly new phenomenon. In his book How Dogs Love Us, neurologist Gregory Burns of Emory University named Charles Darwin as a pioneer in the field in the 1800s. Darwin has written extensively about dogs and how they express emotions in body language in his third work, Expressing Emotions in Humans and Animals. Attention to the first major contemporary study, conducted in 1990 by Brian Hare, Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, then a final year student at Emory University. However, this area of ​​research gained real popularity only in the 2000s. Currently, new research on how dogs understand human language, gestures, and emotions is being conducted fairly regularly. The field became so popular that Duke University even opened a special unit called the Canine Cognition Center under the direction of Dr. Hare.

Do dogs understand people?

So what are the results of all the research done? Do dogs understand us? It seems that dog owners who claimed that dogs understand them were right, at least in part.

Understanding speech

In 2004, Science published the results of a study involving a border collie named Rico. This dog conquered the scientific world, demonstrating an amazing ability to quickly grasp new words. Rapid grasping is the ability to form an elementary understanding of the meaning of a word after first hearing it, which is characteristic of young children at the age when their vocabulary begins to form. Rico learned the names of over 200 different objects, learning to distinguish between them by name and find them within four weeks of first meeting.

A later study by the University of Sussex in England showed that dogs not only understand emotional cues in our speech, but they can also distinguish between meaningful words and meaningless speech. A 2014 study published in the journal Current Biology confirms that dogs, like humans, use different brain regions to process these aspects of speech. More precisely, emotional signals are processed by the right hemisphere of the brain, and meanings of words are processed by the left.

Understanding body language

A 2012 study by PLOS ONE magazine confirmed that dogs understand human social cues to the point that they can influence them. During the study, pets were offered two portions of food of different sizes. Most of the dogs chose a large portion on their own. But when people intervened, the situation changed. It became obvious that a positive human reaction to a smaller portion can convince animals that it is desirable to choose it.

Another study from 2012 highlighted in Current Biology, Hungarian researchers studied the ability of dogs to interpret subtle forms of information transmission. During the study, animals were shown two different versions of the same video. In the first version, the woman looks at the dog and says the words: "Hello, dog!" in an affectionate tone before looking away. The second version differs in that the woman looks down all the time and speaks in a muffled voice. When watching the first version of the video, the dogs looked at the woman and followed her gaze. Based on this response, the researchers concluded that dogs have the same cognitive ability as babies between six and twelve months of age, recognizing direct calls and information directed to them.

This was probably not a revelation to Dr. Hare of the Center for the Study of Cognitive Processes in Canine at Duke University, who conducted his own experiments with dogs as a final-year student at Emory University in the 1990s. According to the portal Phys. org, Dr. Hare's research confirmed that dogs are better at understanding subtle cues such as finger-pointing, body position, and eye movements than our closest chimpanzees and even children.

Understanding emotions

Earlier this year, the authors of a study published in the British Royal Society's Biology Letters reported that animals are capable of understanding human emotions. A collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom and the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, the study confirms that dogs develop abstract mental representations of positive and negative emotional states.

During the study, dogs were shown pictures of people and other dogs that looked happy or angry. The display of images was accompanied by a demonstration of audio clips vocalized in a happy or angry/aggressive tone. When the emotion expressed by the vocalization matched the emotion depicted in the picture, the pets spent significantly more time studying the facial expressions in the picture.

According to one researcher, Dr. Ken Guo of the University of Lincoln School of Psychology, "Previous research has shown that dogs are able to discriminate human emotions for cues such as facial expressions, but that is not the same as emotion recognition," according to the website. Science Daily.

By combining two different channels of perception, the researchers showed that dogs do have the cognitive ability to recognize and understand human emotions.

Why do dogs understand us?

The reason why pets are able to understand us is still a mystery, but most researchers consider this ability to be a result of evolution and a necessity. Dogs have been closely associated with humans for thousands of years and over time began to depend on humans more than any other animal species. It is possible that pedigree breeding also played a role, for which dogs were selected on the basis of certain visible cognitive abilities. In any case, it is obvious that individuals closely related to and dependent on humans sooner or later develop the ability to understand and communicate with us.

What does this mean for you and your puppy?

Now that you are better aware that your pet is able to understand not only words and verbal commands but also emotional cues, what difference does that make? First of all, it gives you confidence that your puppy is able to learn not only the commands "Sit!", "Stand!" and "Paw!" Dogs have an amazing ability to memorize hundreds of words like Rico mentioned above and Chaser, a border collie with over 1,000 words. Chaser has an incredible ability to quickly catch new words and can find a toy by name. If you ask him to find among the toys known to him an object whose name is unfamiliar to him, he will understand that the new toy must be correlated with a new unknown name. This ability proves that our four-legged friends are very smart.

Another issue addressed in the study of cognitive ability in dogs is whether they are able to understand social cues. Have you noticed that when you have a hard day, the dog tries to stay close to you and often fondles you? In this way, he wants to say: "I understand that you have a difficult day, and I want to help." If you understand this, it is easier for you to strengthen the relationship, because you know how to react to each other's emotional state and share the joys and sorrows - like a real family.

Do dogs understand us? Certainly. Therefore, the next time you talk to your pet and notice that he is listening to you carefully, be sure that it does not seem to you. Your dog doesn't understand every word and doesn't know the exact meaning, but he knows you better than you think. But more importantly, your pet is able to understand that you love him, so do not think that talking to him about your love is pointless.