Researchers from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology and Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary conducted brain scans on dogs and found that they actively listen when humans speak to them. Interestingly, their listening patterns closely resemble those of infants, showing a preference for specific tones.
Infants are known to respond positively to high-pitched, singsong voices that exaggerate vowel sounds. This style of speech can significantly influence a child’s brain development. However, unlike infants, dogs are not exposed to female voices before birth, and high-pitched communication is not common in dog interactions.
So, why do dogs prefer female voices and “baby talk”?
To investigate this, the research team trained 19 dogs of various breeds, aged between 2 to 10 years, to stay still in an fMRI machine while their brains were scanned. The dogs listened to three types of prerecorded human speech: speech directed at dogs, babies, and adults, spoken by both male and female speakers.
The results showed that dogs exhibited more activity in their auditory cortex when they heard the exaggerated voices typically used for pets or babies, especially when the speaker was a woman.
Neuroethologist Anna Gábor suggests that this could be because women tend to use exaggerated prosody, which includes elements like tone, stress, rhythm, and emotion, more often when speaking to dogs.
In the brain scans, human voices were processed in a secondary part of the dog’s auditory cortex, known as the temporal pole, and in the Sylvian gyrus, an area between the temporal, frontal, and parietal lobes.
Previous studies have shown that a similar part of the brain is activated in babies when they listen to “baby talk.” As for how dogs developed this human-like trait, scientists propose two main theories: either there is an ancient and universal sensitivity among mammals to higher-pitched sounds with greater frequency variability, or this was a characteristic humans selected for when domesticating wolves.
The researchers suggest that animals with a greater sensitivity to dog-directed speech might have had a better chance of staying close to humans and paying attention to their vocal cues during the domestication process.
While further research is needed, the authors believe that the similarities they found between how dogs and babies respond to adult voices are worth further exploration. This could potentially provide valuable insights into human evolution.
The study was published in Communications Biology.
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