With Dogs, It’s What You Say — and How You Say It
Marlene Breverman stashed this in Dog behavior
Dr. Andics, who studies language and behavior in dogs and humans, along with Adam Miklosi and several other colleagues, reported in a paper to be published in this week’s issue of the journal Science that different parts of dogs’ brains respond to the meaning of a word, and to how the word is said, much as human brains do.
As with people’s brains, parts of dogs’ left hemisphere react to meaning and parts of the right hemisphere to intonation — the emotional content of a sound. And, perhaps most interesting to dog owners, only a word of praise said in a positive tone really made the reward system of a dog’s brain light up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/science/with-dogs-its-what-you-say-and-how-you-say-it.html
Stashed in: Emotion, Communication, Brain, Dogs!, Meaning of Life, DOGS, Communication, Darwin, Pets!
"In terms of evolution of language, the results suggest that the capacity to process meaning and emotion in different parts of the brain and tie them together is not uniquely human. This ability had already evolved in non-primates long before humans began to talk.
Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University who was not involved in the study, said he thought the experiment was well done and suggested that specialization of right and left hemispheres in processing information began to evolve well before human language. But, he said, it was still possible that dogs had independently evolved a similar brain organization."
Co-evolution!
11:35 PM Aug 30 2016