Humans can communicate various instructions to dogs without using actual words—simply by modulating the tone of their voice, a new study from ELTE University’s Department of Ethology shows. By repeating the nonsense syllable ‘bü’ in different intonations, humans successfully signaled “Yes,” “No,” “Here,” and “There” and, remarkably, dogs responded correctly, despite receiving no prior training. The findings reveal ancient acoustic codes, interpretable across species, that predate language itself. The study was published in Cognition.
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I thought this was already quite obvious and widely known - I suppose there simply hadn’t yet been a formal study.
It was — somebody just wanted an easy paper to publish.
And they get to play with dogs for work.
Yea, pretty confident that the current understanding in animal behavior and psychology, as it relates to dogs, is that they don’t comprehend words. It’s all just noise. You can cue a dog to perform a behavior with any noise, or easier yet, no noise and just a hand signal. Dogs respond better to hand signals than verbal ones, fun fact. When you’re instilling a new behavior, best practice is to add the verbal cue only after the dog has sufficiently learned the behavior
Now do cats!
Yea, not as well educated as far as cat training goes, but you can train any animal the same way, Pavlov’s classical conditioning. You can even train butterflies to fly between two points with the technique! Very cool
I trained my dog with fingersnaps. One snap was come to me. 2 snaps was follow me. One snap and a finger pointing to the ground was “sit down here” and he would sit wherever I’d point. Lost that dog almost 20 years ago, miss him like hell to this day. I can’t get another dog. There was something in his eyes that I simply can’t see in other dogs’ eyes.
Obviously, they could have simply asked a bunch of dog owners but that’s considered anecdotal. Doing this in a controlled environment eliminates any bias from the owners.