Your Dog Understands You Much More Than You Think, Study Finds

When you talk to your dog, it probably understands far more than you imagine - as a new study shows that dogs even understand ‘tone of voice’.

In fact, when you praise a dog, its reward centres in the brain light up - but only if your tone of voice matches what you’re saying.

Researchers found that the two hemispheres of dogs’ brains lit up inside an fMRI scanner as they processed language - looking for both meaning and intonation.

‘It shows that for dogs, a nice praise can very well work as a reward, but it works best if both words and intonation match,’ said lead researcher Attila Andics of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

'So dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant.

'The human brain not only separately analyzes what we say and how we say it, but also integrates the two types of information, to arrive at a unified meaning.

'Our findings suggest that dogs can also do all that, and they use very similar brain mechanisms.’