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Can dogs understand people?

They are our closest friends for thousands of years. They live with us, work with us and even become part of our family. But does this still allow dogs to understand our words and feelings? Although dog owners claimed otherwise. When scientists and other experts seemed to have understood what a dog’s owner has said for a long time. He believed it was just a combination of learned behavior and how the owner reflected human qualities to the dog. However, many recent studies have raised the question “Do dogs understand people?”

Dogs Understand People?

Dog Behavior Research Although humanity has had a long-standing relationship with dogs. It is quite new to investigate how dogs treat and process information cognitively. Gregory Berns, a neurologist at Emory University, points to Charles Darwin. A pioneer in the field in the 1800s, in his book How Dogs Love Us. Darwin wrote a lot about dogs and their expressions of emotion and body language in his third scientific study, “Body Language in Humans and Animals”. Phys.org points to the studies of an undergraduate student at Emory University after the Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University in 1990s as the first study in modern sense. Nevertheless, it is not possible to say that much work has been done in this area until 2000s.

These days, new studies are being conducted on how dogs understand and react to people’s words, emotions, and body language regularly. In fact, this field of study has become so popular that Dr. Duke at Duke University. A special center known as the Dog Cognitive Research Center was established under the supervision of Hare. Do Dogs Understand People? So what did all these new researches discover? Can dogs understand us? All the persistent claims made by dog owners that their dogs really understand them seem partially true.

Understanding Emotions

In 2004, a study about a Border Collie dog named Rico was published in Science magazine. Rico captivated the world of science with his unique ability to “quickly match” new words. Fast matching is the ability to form a basic hypothesis about the meaning of a word after a single encounter and is a skill common to young children in years of learning to speak. Riko learned the names of more than 200 different objects. He was able to identify their names by remembering them four weeks after they learned their first names.

A more recent study by researchers at Sussex University in the UK revealed that dogs. Not only understand the emotional clues in our conversation, but also distinguish between meaningful words and meaningless ones. A 2014 study published in the journal Current Biology. Showed that dogs, like humans, used different parts of the brain to address these aspects of speech. More specifically, dogs consider emotional clues on the right side of the brain, and the meanings of words on the left side.

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Understanding Body Language

A study published in PLOS ONE magazine in 2012 revealed that dogs can understand human social behavior. In this study, the dogs were given two servings of different sizes. When they were on their own, the majority of dogs naturally turned to larger portions. But things have changed when people got involved. It has been shown that a human’s positive reaction to a smaller portion can convince dogs that smaller portions are more preferable.

In the other version, the only difference was that the woman looked at the dog with fixed and empty eyes and spoke with a callous expression before looking at the food container. When the first version was shown, the dogs paid attention to the woman and followed her gaze. Based on this response, the researchers determined that dogs had the same cognitive ability as a six to twelve-month-old baby. And understand this when they were expressed directly to them and information was transferred. This started as an undergraduate student in Emory in the 1990s, starting his own experiments with dogs and social tips, and later heading the Duke University Dog Cognitive Research Center.

It may not be a surprise for Hare. According to Phys.org, Dr. Hare’s research revealed that dogs are better than chimpanzees, our closest cousins, and even human kids who can point and follow subtle hints such as body orientation and eye movements.

Dogs Understand Emotions

Earlier this year, a study published in the RSBL led to the discovery that dogs have the ability to perceive and understand human emotions. The study conducted jointly by researchers from the University of Lincoln (UK) and the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil). Found that dogs create abstract mental representations of positive and negative emotional states.

In the aforementioned study, pictures of people who seem happy and angry, and other dogs were shown to the dogs. In addition to the pictures, recordings with happy and angry sounds were played. When the voice-over recordings matched the emotion in the image, the dogs spent much longer to study the facial expression in the image.

One of the researchers in the study, Dr. Lincoln University of Psychology. “Previous studies have stated that dogs can differentiate human emotions from clues like facial expressions. But this is not the same as emotional recognition,” Ken Guo said in ScienceDaily. However, those who carried out this research showed that by combining two different sensory input sources, dogs actually have a cognitive ability to recognize and understand human emotions.

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