What's going on behind those puppy dog eyes? Your dog may understand more words than they let on.
EEG brain recordings show that dogs understand the referential nature of object words similarly to people.. We understand that certain words “stand for” certain objects, and this understanding is assumed to depend on the formation of mental representations of words. If I say “tennis ball” to you, we both activate mental representations in our minds. This is how we can understand each other, even if we are talking about things that are not directly present.
Boros says there are numerous factors that can confound behavioral studies of word knowledge in dogs, including the subjects’ energy,, and understanding of the task. She and her colleagues thought that neural measures may be more sensitive to implicit or passive word knowledge. They decided to probe dogs’ referential understanding by measuring brain activity using noninvasive electroencephalogram .
“Our idea was that if dogs understand the word, then when they hear the word, they will activate a mental representation,” writes Boros. “When this mental representation is activated and then the owner shows a toy that does not match the mental representation, this should be reflected in their brain responses.
“This is an important addition to the debate on whether animals communicate about things other than their emotions,” writes Boros. “We know that animals will vocalize to communicate their internal states, but whether they are also vocalizing to ‘talk’ about things that are outside of themselves is not completely understood... Now that we see this capacity in dogs, we might want to rethink whether other mammals may use vocalizations to refer to external things in their natural environments.
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