Dogs Are Better Listeners Than We Thought

0:00A payday candy bar is miles and miles of peanuts. Salty crunchy peanut, sweet sweet caramel, wrapping you up with every bite. Enjoy the tasty journey, my friend. Payday, peanut caramel bar. Parenting unlocks some pretty impressive skills, like carrying grocery bags, a soccer ball, and a sleepy kid all at once. Good thing the newly designed Chrysler Pacifica has a few tricks of its own. Hands-free power sliding doors and lift gate, rear seat entertainment, and still-en-go seating and storage that adapts faster than your family's weekend plans. Visit Chrysler.com to learn more. Chrysler is a registered trademark of FCAUS LLC. Upgrading your dinner party conversation, one show at a time. The last show with David Cooper. How well does your dog really listen to you when you talk to it? I assume it's not very well

1:01and the dog owners were just kind of blinded by their love for their animals. But maybe I'm wrong because there's a study that says the way that your dog listens to you is a lot more complicated than just recognizing a command or two. Scientists have found evidence that dog brains contract certain patterns of human speech, even when your words themselves mean absolutely nothing to them. So how has living along with humans for thousands of years influenced dog brains? That's what I want to talk about here with Autila Auditch who is a cognitive neuroscientist at Erdva's LaRonde University in Hungary. Autila, welcome to the show. Hi David, thanks for having me. So why the fascination with dog brains? What makes you want to do research into them? Well, dogs are a beautiful natural experiment. They lived with us for about 5,000 generations by now and this is about the time actually when what humans needed language to emerge. So sometime between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago,

2:06we assume humans became from a non-speaking species into a speaking species. And we don't really understand how this could have happened. What was the big thing that changed there? Was this a big change in our brain that made us so good language users? Or is it more an invention? Something that changed came as an idea and then changed the environment and changed the way we then listened to things and changed the brain as a consequence? That's interesting. So like where our brains ready, so to speak, to start using language, had they evolved or adapted and some environmental change or some random chance made us able to speak? Or did our brains kind of slowly evolve and develop speech? Is that kind of the question there? Yes, exactly. And also whether there is anything special needed to be there in the brain to start with. Because now if you look at an adult humans brain,

3:09you see that there are many special tunings. The human brain is just tuned to process speech. We are much better at processing speech than many other types of stimuli. And we are very efficient at processing speech. We have specific preferences when we process speech, which actually make sense. And for that to happen, researchers argued for a long time that those special complex linguistic abilities that humans now have are necessary. And we ask the question here now in this research. And this is why we need it dogs. Is this really a special brain that is required for us to be such efficient speech listeners? Or can it be just a consequence of us being very good better learners, better recognized or something that many other animals do? And that can actually change how our brain functions

4:09when we are listening to speech. Such a fascinating question. So when you look at dog brains with that question, what do you end up seeing? And how do you study them to figure this stuff out? Yeah, so first of all, there is a very interesting phenomenon. When we listen to someone speaking, we attend to consonants more than two vowels because they are more useful for picking out words. So acoustically, actually, it doesn't make sense because the vowels are much louder and more attractive in the speech, but still we pay more attention to consonants. And the only logical explanation behind it is that we would like to pick out words from that continuous speech. I can give you an example. If I say a proverb without the consonants, something like gagge, gagge, gagge, then you don't really have a chance to understand what I'm trying to say. But if I hide all the vowels and keep just the consonants, it will become something like bidirelite, dinnevere. Better late than never. Wow, I was exactly.

5:11So that's how we do this. We get speech from consonants because that's what makes the skeleton of words in most languages. That's what helps us segment continuous speech into words. But why do we do that? Do we humans do that so efficiently? This consonant based speech listening because we have our special human brain inherently wired for the language use, or because we are so efficient pattern learners, and that's all we need for that. So this is what we asked in this study. And we're asking whether dogs interpret sounds the same way. Exactly. So we ask dog brains and human brains, this same question using a so-called non-invasive electro-ancophagographic technique, EEG. So we put, say, putting it simple, we placed electrodes on the scalp of the head of dogs and humans to record the electric activity of the brain.

6:14And while we were doing this, we were playing different types of speech, continuous speech without the brakes, but with special patternings in it. In some cases, the patterns in that continuous speech were given by consonants. In some other cases, they were given by vowels only. And there was also a third case when there was no patterning at all. And we used a very exciting phenomenon, a brain phenomenon, which is the so-called neural synchronization. This means that if you hear a rhythm, then your brain and trains on that rhythm. So the brain starts showing that same rhythm. So with these consonant patterns in the continuous speech we gave, we created a rhythm, and also with the vowel patterns. And so we were interested in whether we see that rhythm emerging, in the brain of dogs or in the brain of humans,

7:16like they are listening to this speech. And it turned out, and this is the first ever evidence in a non-human showing this consonant bias, that dogs actually just as humans and train on the consonant pattern speech more than on the allow patterned speech. And this is also an evidence that so we don't need to be humans for this simple, better learning capacity what dogs probably have is enough for such a consonant bias, for such a tuning to speech to emerge, to develop. Does this mean many animals could potentially be attuned to speech like this? Because our common ancestor with dogs is for many, many, many years ago. Exactly. The last common ancestor of dogs and humans lived some 900 million years ago. We don't know. It can be that this is something special for dogs, not because other species are not so good, so good pattern learners. They are. What dogs might be special about here is that they care about speech

8:17and they care about the persons who speak. So this interest, this special interest, this great motivation in what we humans are and what we do with our voice makes dogs much better positioned to learn simple patterns from our words. So it's more the motivation, not the cognitive capacity that positions dogs somehow differently than other species, but I can imagine that if you have a company and animal which is super excited in what you speak, well, show me one such animal other than dog, but if you have one, then that could also develop a consonant bias probably. We never tried. We should. You should. And I mean anecdotally in my cat, if I say his name the way my girlfriend says it with the same intonation, tomato, or I just say potato, and I say whatever word in that same intonation, he comes running happily. I'm not sure this is necessarily relating to your study, but what it does say is animals are paying attention to us, maybe not in the same way that we think they are. But yeah, does this mean that dogs are maybe better listeners

9:19than we thought they were? They probably are. We did many studies where we compared dogs with pigs actually, pigs, company and pigs that lived the same way which humans as dogs did. And we found that there are many things, that kinds of paying attention to humans, at which dogs are just much better spontaneously than pigs, even if the two species grew up very similarly. And dogs do this consonant pattern checking thing also, if they grew up in a shelter or in a, or on the streets. So it's something that they can develop later in their life as well. Until like your research is fascinating. Thank you for being on the show. Thanks very much for having me. Atilla Andich is a cognitive narrow scientist at Ertfasch LaRonde University in Hungary.