Anyone who owns a dog knows. there are times when you can be sure that your pet understands what you are saying. This happens because the animal actually understands you. A study by Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest has shown that man’s best friend can really understand what his owner is saying.
To come to this conclusion, scientists trained 13 puppies in the oldest trick in the trainer’s manual: lying down. This was necessary because the animals had to remain as static as possible so that the MRI could read the animals’ brains with maximum accuracy.
After teaching the trick, the researchers had the owners read sentences in different contexts: positive sentences with positive intonation, positive sentences with neutral intonation, neutral sentences with neutral intonation, and neutral sentences with positive intonation. “Neutral phrases” in this case mean words that have no meaning at all, but are very similar to encouraging phrases. Since the study is in Hungarian, they used “azaz” (that’s right!) as one of their positive expressions and “akár” (what if) as one of their neutral expressions; just click on the words to see how they sound. . If we were to translate this into our reality, we would have “congratulations, big dog” and then “six children and a wagon”.
Researchers have found that animals’ brains release higher levels of dopamine when their owners say something nice in a pleasant voice. He realized that the sentence was just nothing, and his brain system rewarded him.
The study led the researchers to discover that, just like humans, dogs tend to use the right side of their brain to analyze the tone of the sound around them and the left to focus on what is being said. taking these two analyzes into account to arrive at a conclusion on how to respond to the sentence in question.
This does not mean that if you curse the dog in a friendly tone of voice, he will not wag his tail at you. This means that if you use the same curse word several times in the same affectionate tone, he will interpret that word as a compliment. Animals build their vocabulary of negative and positive words based on the tone of their owners’ voices.
The researchers recorded the process in a short and beautiful video. You can check it out below (to watch with Portuguese subtitles, just click on the gear, then select the “subtitles/CC” option and click “auto translate”).