HyperLoop555

Do you ever talk to your dog? Do they ever talk back?  Humans and dogs have a truly amazing relationship, developed along an evolutionary journey that goes back nearly 10,000 years.  Do they really understand what we say, think, and feel?  Recent research suggests dogs know more about our language and emotions than you might think Meet Chaser the border collie: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/sci... See Chaser in action: https://www.youtube.com/user/pilleyjw Dogs can process words' emotion separate from meaning: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/p... Left-gaze bias in dogs and humans: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3... Charles Darwin's "Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" https://archive.org/details/expressio... Decoding dog barks: http://www.apa.org/monitor/may05/dogs...

If you’re a dog person who has suspected that your four-legged friend may know exactly what you mean when you use certain words or phrases—for example “toy,” or “car,” or maybe even “who’s the good boy?” (he is)—you may be correct. A new study by scientists at Emory University and published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience suggests dogs possess a basic understanding of the words they’ve been taught to associate with objects. After training 12 very good dogs of different breeds over the course of two to six months to discern between two toys based on their respective names, the researchers then utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study whether they possessed a basic ability to differentiate between human speech they were taught to remember and new or unfamiliar words. “Many dog owners think that their dogs know what some words mean, but there really isn’t much scientific evidence to support that,” Ashley Prichard, a Ph.D. candidate in...