ENIKÖ KUBINYILike humans, dogs use the left sides of their brains to process words and the right sides to process intonation. In a recent study, praise only activated dogs’ reward center in the brain when both the words and the intonation were positive. The results, published this week (August 30) in Science, suggest that the neural mechanisms to process language are not unique to humans and evolved earlier than previously believed.
“The human brain not only separately analyzes what we say and how we say it, but also integrates the two types of information, to arrive at a unified meaning,” study coauthor Attila Andics of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest said in a press release. “Our findings suggest that dogs can also do all that, and they use very similar brain mechanisms.”
Andics and colleagues trained 13 dogs to lie still in an fMRI scanner as a trainer spoke to them. The trainer would praise them with positive intonation (e.g., “well done!” in Hungarian), praise them with neutral intonation, or speak words that were meaningless to the dogs (e.g., “as if”) in positive or neutral intonations. The results of the scans showed that the dogs used ...
