Dogs pick up not only on the words we say but also on our intent to communicate with them, according to a report published online in the Cell Press Journal Current Biology on January 5, 2012.
This finding isn't a surprise....a listener recently called into my national radio show explaining that she had lost her voice for several consecutive months, but surprisingly she had little problem communicating her dogs.
One study demonstrated that dogs are far more likely to understand our intent by paying attention to our signaling, compared to presumably more intelligent chimpanzees.
Jozsef Topal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has his group presented dogs with video recordings of a person turning toward one of two identical plastic pots while an eye tracker captured information on the dogs' reactions. In one condition, the person first looked straight at the dog, addressing it in a high-pitched voice with "Hi dog!" In the second condition, the person gave only a low-pitched "Hi dog" while avoiding eye contact.
The data shows that the dogs were more likely to follow along and look at the pot when the person first expressed an intention to communicate.
In a sense this may explain why so many people treat their furry friends like their children; dogs' receptivity to human communication is surprisingly similar to the receptivity of very young children, according to the researchers. Dogd share social cues with people. Those cues include verbal addressing and eye contact. Whether or not dogs rely on similar pathways in the brain for processing those cues isn't yet clear, but I personally would not be surprised - after all, we now also know we evolved with dogs.
Another point not lost on the researchers is what many dog trainers have been saying forever - dogs are constantly throughout their lifetimes asking us questions and learning.
Also, if one believes all the public television shows on why "dogs aren't wolves," they are so bred, while the ones who don't get thrown back to the wolves, citing the Siberian "trying to breed a tame fox" project.
The more exciting research would be if they could prove that cats listen to anything, although, again last week on Camara Loca, there was one cat that could sit, shake paws, and roll over. Maybe that show is educational.