A new study finds dogs’ brains process human and canine vocalizations differently, suggesting they evolved to recognize our voices from their own.
My dog Leo clearly knows the difference between my voice and the barks of the beagle next door. When I speak, he looks at me with love; when our canine neighbor makes his mind known, Leo barks back with disdain. A new study backs up what I and my fellow dog owners have long suspected: Dogs’ brains process human and canine vocalizations differently, suggesting they evolved to recognize our voices from their own.
Previous research has found that dogs can match human voices with expressions. When played an audio clip of a lady laughing, for example, they’ll oftenBut how exactly the canine brain processes sounds isn’t clear. MRI has shown certain regions of the dog brain are more active when a pup hears another dog whine or bark. But those images can’t reveal exactly when neurons in the brain are firing, and whether they fire differently in response to different noises.
The researchers then played audio clips of human and dog vocalizations. The human sounds included only nonlanguage vocalizations like baby babble, laughter, and coughing, whereas the dog sounds included sniffing, panting, and barking. Each sound was classified as conveying either a “positive” or “neutral” emotion, based on the context they were made in, like the excited yelp of a dog playing with a ball.
Moreover, when the dogs’ brain waves peaked in the 250- to 650-second range, they fired differently depending on who they were listening to. The waves were
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