What happens in your dog’s brain when you speak
science.org
science.org
https://twitter.com/airbagmoments/status/1387421368405348357...
It wouldn’t happen for any other animal (ok, maybe for the evil creatures named cats).
It’s not that the scientists took care of the dogs that impress me (it was even needed for the experiment) but that the article author felt that it was important enough to mention it multiple times.
Imagine if the subject was a mouse.
For any dog, it would be the greatest day of all times since at least yesterday.
Ah ah ah, that's a very good description. I find dogs so boring because of this.
If they don't want to do something then they'll certainly provide some amusement value. Apart from parrots, huskies seem to be the only animal species capable of saying the word "No".
As someone on the HuskyTrantrums subreddit said, huskies are the best pets to watch someone else own.
Unless it's _ever so slightly_ damp outside, then my dog will cower in fear at the thought of getting her paws wet. Pouring rain though? Completely fine!
Pretty good vocabulary really.
My current dog is practically a genius by comparison. She understands complex instructions (“go outside and go potty and then let’s go to bed” - and off she goes!)
Amazing the breadth of comprehension and intelligence from dog to dog.
The mom is not great with coming when asked, never has been. Her kids though, as soon as I whistle a certain way they show up and sit in front of me. Generally they are really good at following instructions, perhaps it's because the father is a working dog.
My current dog (the smart one) appears to be a miniature pincher / Chihuahua mix. Hard to say for sure since we rescued her off the street.
While this video is long, it explains the controversy very well: https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4
But look at more of Bunny's videos. Some of the interpretations are fanciful (a pet peeve of mine is the "love you" interactions where there's little reason to think the "love you" means more than "I want attention"), but there are enough of fairly complex interactions that I think it's unreasonable to dismiss it entirely.
And then it would still suffer from potential human over-interpretation, finding meaning where there isn't, as described in the Koko video you linked.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BorderCollie/comments/rrgckg/bowie_...
Just strikes me as an interesting cultural current. Perhaps the real role of science is to help transition between generations of knowledge. What is todays equivalent of geocentrism? What will replace it?
It is unfortunate that popular writing on science is so hand-wavey. People get confused by that and start treating it like a religion. Surly if science has a better more objective way to see the world, it should be able to be made more plain. On the other hand maybe society needs a priest caste.
Pardon my wild tangent, I merely hope to provoke unusual thought.
This seems to be the real practical focus of the research. There’s no surprise that dogs can understand human speech (they obviously do to some degree, as do many animals), but rather digging deeper into the nuances so we can refine our communication with them.
Training a service dog can take up to two years and an experienced trainer - research here might be able to shorten that time and increase the pool of available dogs.
I think a more interesting take on the article is that dogs do NOT process woofs like we, and they, process human language. It seems to suggest that there is a qualitative difference between speaking and barking, and also (as stated in the article) that dogs picked up a new set of language skills only by listening to us, which is super cool and in a way the most dog-like thing possible. In that sense I'd say that human and beast are proven different by the experiment.
I gave out quite a laugh while I was reading this. More so, because I peeking at the article with my stern scientific mind. Now I know that dogs and humans process language differently at University of Maryland.
Obviously the sentence should've been written:
> who studies at the University of Maryland how dogs and humans process language
Treats and praise would be my guess
I wonder if the olfactory cortex is more sophisticated or simply larger. I have a large dog and I recon the surface area of his nose is probably the same as my house or larger.
I'm pretty sure most dogs understand "no" (and the equivalent word in other languages is often 1 syllable). I haven't done anything approaching a study, but I've trained many dogs in my life and my experience disagrees with you. Some other common words they know really well include: treat, sit, off, here - basically anything you teach them.
"Who's that" is something we always said when approaching someone we recognise, and now if she hears those words - even totally out of context, mid way through a conversation - she gets excited and goes to look out of the window.