Researchers – who arranged for headphone-wearing dogs to listen to excerpts from The Little Prince, a novella – revealed the brains of our canine companions can tell the difference between speech and non-speech when listening to human voices and show different responses to speech in an unfamiliar language.
It comes from a three-year study conducted by Mars Petcare veterinarians, researchers and scientists, who studied more than 5,000 videos from 2,500 dogs submitted by owners (more than 11 million days of pets playing), to understand what various behaviour changes – and eventual vet appointments – added up to.
Your article (Paws for thought: dogs may be able to figure out human intentions, 1 September ) was interesting, although like most dog owners, I smile at some of the efforts of scientific researchers to find out what we know already.
Researchers at Concordia's Pediatric Public Health Psychology Lab (PPHP) found that the sleep quality of children sharing beds with their pets is much better than the ones who sleep alone.Sharing their bed with a pet brings positivity and sound sleep to children at night.
The UK’s most popular dog and cat breeds during lockdown - Revealed.(Image: Getty)The researchers also revealed the most popular dog breeds and the names most commonly assigned for each:.The most popular names for British Shorthair cats was also Luna.
Now researchers say they’ve found some dogs are indeed able to learn the names of new objects, and rapidly – and that this occurs through play.“It is similar to the situation [by] which human children learn words, but we don’t know if the mechanism [in the brain] is the same,” said Dr Claudia Fugazza of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary , an author of the new study.
Researchers measuring brain activity with non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) on awake dogs to find out how they learn words.(Credits: Vivien Reicher / SWNS)A dog’s brain cannot tell the difference between similar sounding words such as dog and dig, according to a new study.
Photograph: Phil Crowder/Alamy This created a messy, intertwined relationship between different dog types, with the details of a breed’s origin sometimes recorded only in oral history.The German shepherd shares DNA with Italian dog breeds, including the cane paratore, according to researchers.
Both dogs and humans, however, do have a brain region that sparks when a member of the same species comes into view.“Faces are central to human visual communication … and human brains are also specialized for faces,” study co-author Attila Andics, an animal behavior researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, said in an email.
Millions of live wild animals are being legally imported into the UK from hot spots of emerging diseases , risking the spread of lethal viruses , researchers have discovered.
Masks made with common household fabrics help prevent the spread of viruses like Covid-19 as researchers have found that they are considerably effective at blocking droplets similar to those that may be released by speaking, coughing and sneezing, even as a single layer.