Man’s best friend; this is a hard title to live up to. Dogs provide affection and companionship; they can be a person’s eyes and hands; and are an integral member of our families in many of our households. The question arises: how much do they really understand when it comes to our language and is there a better way to communicate with them? Dogs have had a long shared evolution with humans and because of this they have become sensitive to the verbal and nonverbal cues of them.
For decades, researchers have been studying the social cognition (def.: how someone, or in this case some dog, process, store, and apply information about others and social situations) in dogs. All social animals have developed ways of reading each other’s cues but this becomes a little more difficult between species. Recent studies have shown that dogs have become quite adept at recognizing human social cues even more so than our closest relative on the evolutionary tree, the chimpanzee. There are a couple different hypotheses as to why this is so. First, dogs are descended from wolves that live in social hierarchical packs where knowing what your pack-member is thinking is quite handy when hunting. Their responses to testing in this regards was even worse t
han the chimpanzees. The second theory is that a puppy develops these social skills as they are growing up. This would explain the ability if raised predominantly around humans but that doesn’t explain why those raised with their littermates without much human interaction still has the capacity to read human social cues.
The most probable reason for the understanding is that dogs and humans have lived together for eons and as such have evolved together. Through domestication, only the tamest and most easily handled animals would have been selected. If for nothing else, this was done for safety reasons. (Wolves are beautiful, intelligent animals but not necessarily without some troublesome characteristics such as eating you when the times get rough.) If you used the calmer, more attentive dogs for breeding you might also get the characteristics of a dog that is better at picking up social cues. Scientists studying this topic are not sure if dogs were bred specifically to be more alert to social cues or if it was a byproduct of domestication. You could say that dogs co-evolved with humans.
The modern training of dogs has much to do with verbal commands and most dog owners speak, sometimes a lot, to their canine companions but how much do they really understand? Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his team have been trying to figure this out. He says, “We know that dogs have the capacity to process at least some aspects of human language since they can learn to follow verbal commands. Previous research, however, suggests dogs may rely on many other cues to follow a verbal command, such as gaze, gestures and even emotional expressions from their owners.” This study took 12 dogs of varying breeds and looked at their responses to words that they were familiar with and those that they were not to see if there would be any difference in that response. These dogs had all been trained to lie still in an MRI machine to visualize their neural response to spoken words from the researchers.
What they had found was the dogs showed more neural activity to the novel word than to the word they already had been trained with. Researchers hypothesize that this is because the dog senses that their owner wants them to understand what they are saying and they are trying to do so. Most dogs have the innate need to please The neural activity centers varied depending on the dogs’ breed; half showed activity in the parietotemporal cortex and the other half in other parts of the brain. The differences may be attributed to the limitation of the study or the variance in dog breeds. A major challenge of mapping a dog’s brain comes with the variety of shape and size across different breeds.
This study does not prove that the most effective way to communicate is through verbal commands. If fact, you may have an easier time training your dog with nonverbal cues. Verbal commands are easier for us but not necessarily for your dog. It isn’t as if your Fido has a large and varied verbal dog language that you just have to figure out. Remember, they have evolved beside us to pick up on visual or scent cues. Dogs want to understand and please their people. It is in their very being.
–Janice Willson
For a cool video about a very smart dog, her extensive vocabulary and the always wonderful Neil Degrasse Tyson, watch the following: https://www.bing.com/videos/searchq=dogs+and+human+language+neil+degrass+tyson&&view=detail&mid=ABE457987F8D262522ECABE457987F8D262522EC&&FORM=VRDGAR
References:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/ehs-scm101518.php
http://gregoryberns.com/dog-project.html
Photo Source: the author
