Dogs don’t just recognize people by smell. Research by the Department of Ethology at the Hungarian State University (ELTE) revealed that these pets can also identify humans in a particular way based on their voice.
Previous work has analyzed the mechanisms that canines use to recognize their environment. Kinga Surányi, a doctoral student in the Department of Ethology at ELTE, says that previous research has shown that dogs are sensitive to various acoustic signals produced by the vocal folds. This allows them to differentiate the gender of the speaker and distinguish between known and unknown people. However, he assures that “until our most recent experiment, its ability to identify individual human voices had not been proven.”
31 dogs participated in the study along with three of their handlers, who had a similar level of interaction with the animals. The researchers recorded the caregivers’ voices and positioned them in a row with a speaker behind them. They then played one of the recordings to see if the canine headed toward the corresponding person. The procedure was repeated 18 times in a random order.
During the tests, the owners remained silent and motionless while the prerecorded materials were broadcast. The scientists conducted questionnaires and an acoustic analysis to identify possible sound and demographic variables that could influence the dogs’ choices.
“The dogs’ performance was above chance: they chose more frequently and looked for longer at the person whose voice they heard. This occurred with all the caregivers, which shows that they could identify them solely by their voice,” concludes the study, published in the journal Animal Behavior.
Dogs identify your voice
The authors highlight that the animals performed better when listening to their main caregiver. “This could be explained because dogs interact more frequently vocally with their main owner, which increases the likelihood that they will react to his voice,” says Anna Gábor, postdoctoral researcher at the Communication Neuroethology Laboratory at ELTE.
The ability to differentiate familiar voices, although seemingly intuitive, represents a significant challenge when analyzed in interactions between species. Until now, individual recognition of human voices has only been documented in macaques rhesus and horses. Demonstrating this ability requires a rigorous experimental design that controls factors such as the animal’s level of familiarity with each transmitter.
Gábor states that “the study shows that dogs know a lot about human voices: not only whether they have heard them before, but also who each voice belongs to.” The researcher suggests that future research should explore whether this ability is generalized among mammals or if it is the result of an evolutionary adaptation in species with close relationships with humans.
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