Have you ever wondered whether your dog understands at least some of what you say to them? Scientists have too. They used to think that only a special few dogs possessed this skill. That’s because, in laboratory studies, the scientists would ask dogs to fetch objects using the object’s name. A special few dogs could do this, but most couldn’t. Now, some evidence shows that the ability of dogs to recognize the names of their toys may be much more widespread. The evidence comes from a team of researchers in Europe, who published their findings in 2024.
In the experiment, the scientists tried a different approach. They monitored the brain waves of eighteen participating dogs, using electrodes attached to their heads. Each dog’s owner was asked to bring five toys familiar to their dog with them to the lab.
During the experiment, the dogs were shown one of the toys by the owner through a small window which prevented the dogs from becoming distracted. Sometimes the owner said the right name for the object, and sometimes a wrong name. When the object and the name didn’t match, the researchers found that the dogs showed a different pattern of brain waves than when they did match. The brain wave patterns that they saw in the dogs resembled those seen in humans when the human is surprised by a similar unexpected mismatch.
The researchers took this as evidence that the dogs understood the name and recognized the mismatch. This is the first time scientists have ever found neurobiological evidence that a nonhuman species can understand words for objects.
