New research papers about canine behavior have revealed dogs are well and truly smart, so smart their intelligence is as sophisticated as a 2-1/2 year old baby.
Scientists have long known dogs are capable of surprisingly complex feats of social intelligence and emotional sensitivity. Recent dog research around the world has shown dogs can learn hundreds of words and do pay attention to the words of our speech and not just the tone of our voice. Dogs can even "read" us to determine what we like or dislike.
Dog expert Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, believes the average dog's intelligence is about as sophisticated as that of a 2-1/2 year old baby, according to Vox.
Using new technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging or MRI to diagnose the anatomy and physiology of dogs and well-designed behavioral experiments, researchers from around the world examined what makes dogs ticks. They discovered these beloved companions are way smarter than we credit them with being.
This research suggests the brightest dogs seem to be capable of remembering over 1,000 different words, an ability likely to have resulted from dogs interacting with humans for thousands of years.
One study said a border collie named Chaser learned the names of 1,022 different toys. When commanded to fetch a specific toy, she retrieved the correct one some 95 percent of the time. The dog was recently trained to recognize verbs and now knows the difference between picking up something, putting her paw on it, and putting her nose on it.
A border collie named Rico was trained to recognize over 200 different words. This dog is also capable of a cognitive process called "fast-mapping". When this dog hears a new word, he fetches a new toy instead of a toy he knows the word for.
Border collies are ranked number one in Coren's "The Intelligence of Dogs" (a book on dog intelligence) and are typically extremely smart, energetic, acrobatic and athletic. The book explains Coren's theories about the differences in intelligence between different breeds of dogs.
Dogs also read people a lot better than chimpanzees. One study revealed human infants and chimps failed at a simple test of at "implicit communication" more often than dogs. In this test, a researcher set two cups upside down on the ground and points at the one with a treat hidden underneath.
Most of the time, babies and chimps are unable to interpret this as a cue to find the food. They investigated the correct cup first only about half the time. In contrast, dogs do interpret this as a cue for food and went for the correct cup at rates far higher than chance, even when both cups were scented to smell like the treat. These experiments were conducted by Brian Hare of Duke University.
Surprisingly, dogs pay attention to the actual words of our speech not just the tone of our voice. Experiments by Victoria Ratcliffe, a psychology researcher at the University of Sussex, suggest dog brains process the actual words in a command.
Ratcliffe explained the left hemisphere in a human brain processes language, and the right hemisphere primarily processes emotion and tone. As a result, most people interpret language using sound from their right ears and interpret tone with the left. Ratcliffe showed dogs do the same thing.
She placed speakers on either side of test dogs and played noise from both at the same time. When she played commands the dogs were familiar with, the dogs disproportionately turned to the right. When she played distorted speech or commands in a language the dogs had never heard before, they mostly turned to the left.