“These gifted dogs can learn new names of toys in a remarkable speed,” said Dr Claudia Fugazza at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, who led the research team.

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.

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.