Dogs have long shown that they can respond to such instruction words as sit, fetch, and come. They have more difficulty differentiating between objects — say a Frisbee or a ball. Earlier research shows that, when asked to choose between two items, dogs pick the correct one about half the time — no better than a coin flip. But a new study shows dogs’ brains respond about as well as a human’s when presented with familiar versus unfamiliar words, according to a study in Current Biology.
Marianna Boros of the Department of Ethology at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and colleagues wanted to understand this discrepancy. Some of the confusion may be due to the nature of the earlier experiments, as well as a dog’s training, background, and personality. “My dog, he has a few toys, but he only cares about one single ball,” says Boros. “It’s possible that they know the word but don’t understand the task.”
