Women or men? Seems like dogs have favorite people

Surely one day, seeing a person talking to a dog using shrill voiceYou told him so: “Don’t talk to him like that, he’s a dog, not deaf.” If you haven’t thought about it, then the person with the piercing voice is you. But in fact it seems that dogs they like those voices. Not because of the intensity, but because of the tone. The sharper the better. And it is for this reason that they listen more carefully when the loudspeakers women.

This is the conclusion reached by recently published studies of scientists from Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology and Eötvös Lorand University, from Hungary. Its authors are not the first to do research in this area. However, they went much further than other studies of dog attention to human voices.

It has already been observed that human babies pay more attention to these high voices than to imitate a baby. This is something that has been studied a lot more, and it actually makes sense since the voice they were most exposed to in the womb was their mother’s voice. For this reason, a sharp and close voice is what they find more comforting. Now dogs at best listen to the barking of their mother. They can, of course, hear human voices, but they can be both male and female voices, and even then they all agree to pay more attention to the voices of the latter. These scientists wanted to confirm that a preference for female voices does exist, and furthermore, to find out why. I will note in advance that they do not have an unambiguous answer to the last question, but there are two. interesting hypotheses.

Finding Preferences in the Brain

To conduct the study, the authors brought together 19 dogs8 different breeds aged from 2 to 10 years.

All of them were embedded in machines functional magnetic resonance analyze their brain activity while they listened to three types of conversations, all adults but with different recipients of the message. In the first, they talked to dogs, in the second, to small children, and in the third, to other adults. Sometimes the men spoke, sometimes the women.

It was clear that there was increased activity of the auditory cortex dogs while using the typical high voice we use to talk to children and pets. But above all, if the speaker was a woman.

More precisely, the activated area was the secondary part of the auditory cortex, known as temporary pole. The area between the temporal lobes, frontal and parietal lobes, called sylvian fissure. Interestingly, these areas are activated in infants. when they listen to other children. So, in addition to reminding mothers, talking to young children like this is good because they feel safe around people like them. The problem, again, is that with dogs this doesn’t make sense, since we don’t talk to them like we would to other dogs.

Why do dogs love women?

Okay, they don’t like women, but they do their voices. This seems obvious, and the authors have several hypotheses. It is true that women prefer to imitate this childish voice when talking to them, but it still does not explain why dogs pay more attention to this voice. children’s voice.

There are two hypotheses that answer this question. On the one hand, if we go back to the phylogenetic tree of various species, we will see that there is a point at which all mammals intersect, with common ancestor. Perhaps this common ancestor or immediate ancestor, where dogs and humans have not yet diverged, preferred high sounds. This will destroy existing hypotheses about children, but it may make sense.

Regarding the second hypothesis, the authors of this study believe that this may be due to wolf taming. We already know that modern dogs are descended from wolves, domesticated by our ancestors. And, perhaps, in the process of domestication, they developed a greater predisposition to listen to the voices of the people around them, including when the words were higher. This is supported by the fact that today’s wolves, unlike dogs, listen more closely to the lowest tones. But there will be gaps in why they prefer women. Were they the ones who tamed the first wolves? We do not know.

There’s a lot we don’t know and we’ll have to keep learning. In fact, these scholars have recognized Scientific Alert what is in your study two big restrictions. Bass on one side number of dogs who took part in it. On the other hand, they had no record of floor human friends of these dogs. That is, if they were taught by women or men. Perhaps it could affect them, just out of habit.

However, judging by the observations, they prefer female voices. At least they get more attention.