By Claudia Bensimoun
First Published: The United States Dog Agility Association (USDAA)
How does your dog know what you mean? This USDAA feature by Claudia Bensimoun on barkuptoday.com reveals dogs understand human communication through tone, body language, and context—not just words.
Studies show that dogs can distinguish between emotional tones (happy vs. angry) and follow gestures, such as pointing, with agility dogs excelling in cue recognition. From vocal pitch to eye contact, it offers practical tips for clearer training signals. Below are key highlights from the article, including how dogs mirror human social cognition. Read the full feature on USDAA.com here.
Dogs are our best friends. We can’t avoid communicating with them, nor would we want to. We’re constantly sending messages — with our words, hand gestures, eyes, and even our scent. We know that training for agility and other dog sports requires effective communication with our dogs to achieve the desired behavior. But how do they know what we’re saying? Do they understand us when we speak?
A study from Emory Health Sciences focuses on the brain mechanisms dogs use to differentiate between words.
“Many dog owners think that their dogs know what some words mean, but there really isn’t much scientific evidence to support that. We wanted to get data from the dogs themselves — not just owner reports,” says Ashley Prichard, Ph.D., now a Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology and first author of the study.
The Study
“We know that dogs have the capacity to process at least some aspects of human language since they can learn to follow verbal commands,” adds Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns, Ph.D., founder of the Dog Project and senior author of the study. “Previous research, however, suggests dogs may rely on many other cues to follow a verbal command, such as gaze, gestures, and even emotional expressions from their owners.”
Prichard and Berns, in a study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, used brain imaging to see how dogs process words they have been taught to associate with objects. Twelve dogs of varying breeds were trained to voluntarily enter an MRI scanner and remain motionless. The dogs were then taught to retrieve two different objects, each with a distinct name. One object was a stuffed toy with a soft texture, and the other was a rubber toy that felt different from the stuffed toy. The dogs learned to fetch a specific object upon request and were rewarded with food or praise. Training ended when the dog showed that he understood the difference between the two objects.
During one experiment, the owner stood in front of the dog at the opening of the MRI scanner and called out the toy names at set intervals. He also showed the dog the matching toys throughout the experiment. For example, a Lab mix called Eddy heard the words “piggy” or “monkey” when his owner held up the toys.
After that, the owner spoke gibberish as he showed the dog new objects, like a hat or a doll. The results were somewhat surprising, as the dogs exhibited more brain activity when hearing the new pseudowords than when hearing the trained words.
Pritchard says, “We expected to see that dogs neurally discriminate between words that they know and words that they don’t. What’s surprising is that the result is opposite to that of research on humans — people typically show greater neural activation for known words than novel words.”
The researchers hypothesized that dogs would show more neural activation when a new word was heard because they believed their owners wanted them to understand the new word, and the dogs were attempting to do so. “Dogs ultimately want to please their owners, and perhaps also receive praise or food,” explains Berns.
The study concluded that dogs possess a basic neural representation of meaning for words they have been taught, and that they differentiate between words they have heard before and those they have never heard before.
Verbal vs. Other Forms of Communication
However, the research doesn’t conclude that words are the most effective way of communicating with your furry best friend. In fact, past studies by both Prichard and Berns have demonstrated that the neural reward system of dogs is more attuned to visual and scent cues than verbal ones.
“When people want to teach their dog a trick, they often use a verbal command because that’s what we humans prefer,” Prichard says. “From the dog’s perspective, however, a visual command might be more effective, helping the dog learn the trick faster.”
Effective communication for training involves understanding how we use verbal communication as well as paraverbal (tone, pitch, and pacing of our voices) and nonverbal (gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, body language, etc.) messages.
Claudia Bensimoun, Dog Language, Canine Communication, Dog Tone Recognition, USDAA Agility Cues, Dog Body Language, Dog Human Interaction, Canine Social Cognition, Dog Training Signals, Vet Communication Insights, Dog Agility Wellness, Canine Behavior Science, Pet Language Skills, Dog Gesture Following, Holistic Dog Training
Resources
1. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181015120901.htm
2. http://gregoryberns.com/dog-project.html
3. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2018.00737/full
Image credits: Pixabay