Dogs Understand More Than They Let On, Brain Scans Reveal

Dogs are able to recognize words and the certain objects they "stand for," a new study has found.

It is widely known that dogs can recognize certain words and perform an action accordingly. For example when you tell a dog to sit, it will do so.

But the new study published by researchers at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, has now found that when dogs hear certain words, they can envision matching objects in their brain.

"Dogs do not only react with a learned behavior to certain words," Marianna Boros, of the Department of Ethology at the Eötvös Loránd University, said in a statement. "They also don't just associate that word with an object based on temporal contiguity without really understanding the meaning of those words, but they activate a memory of an object when they hear its name."

To reach these findings, researchers initiated a test to find out more about how dogs understand objects and words. To do this, they measured their brain activity with non invasive EEG.

The study involved 18 dog owners saying words for certain toys that they knew their dog understood. During the test, sometimes owners showed the matching toy while other times they showed an object that did not match the word they were saying, the study reported.

Researchers found that the dogs' brain recordings had a different pattern when they were presented with an object that matched the word being said by their owner.

For words the dogs understood to a greater degree, there also appeared to be notable brain waves recorded.

These patterns suggest that dogs are able to associate words with certain objects. Originally, the researchers predicted that a dog's ability to associate a word with a matching object would depend on them having a wide knowledge of object words. However, their findings suggest that this is not the case, the study reported.

"Because typical dogs learn instruction words rather than object names, and there are only a handful of dogs with a large vocabulary of object words, we expected that dogs' capacity for referential understanding of object words will be linked to the number of object words they know; but it wasn't," Lilla Magyari, also of Eötvös Loránd University and University of Stavanger, said in a statement.

"It doesn't matter how many object words a dog understands, known words activate mental representations anyway, suggesting that this ability is generally present in dogs and not just in some exceptional individuals who know the names of many objects," Boros continued.

Countless studies have proved dogs' intelligence. And this new study is a step closer towards discovering that dogs may have the capacity to understand words just like humans do, the study reported.

"Your dog understands more than he or she shows signs of," Magyari said in the statement. "Dogs are not merely learning a specific behavior to certain words, but they might actually understand the meaning of some individual words as humans do."

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