© Fred Ohlander on Unsplash
Scrolling back through my Instagram posts recently, I came across a short video I took last summer. I'm throwing a ball into a lake for my parent's yellow lab, Johnson, to fetch. Johnson is pretty excited about the whole affair - perhaps in part because after the successful retrieval you can hear my dad, sitting on the dock offscreen, praising his effort: "Good boy!
GOOD BOY!!!"
This is a scene that probably sounds familiar to many dog owners. We talk to our dogs not only to praise them, but to ask them to perform actions, to identify objects, and sometimes to scold them. And for the most part, they seem to possess some level of understanding. Dogs are motivated by praise, and find this type of social reinforcement
equally or more rewarding than food. Your dog may be able to react to many commands, and they may know some of their favorite toys by name. If you ask Johnson, 'Where is your ball?" he will search for it without fail. And Johnson's ability to retrieve his favorite toy is nothing in comparison to what has been reported in some other dogs, like a border collie named Rico that
knows the names of over 200 items, or a dog named Sofia that can
respond to combinations of two words to perform actions paired with specific objects.
But how dogs process human language was still unknown. To find out more, two research groups used a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner (fMRI) to see which parts of dogs' brains are active when we talk to them. They are looking for evidence that will tell us if dogs understand what words are, what words mean, and whether the areas of their brains that they use to process this information are similar to the areas we use.
Comment: Some additional data just to show the size and extent of the Northeast Greenland national park and how much land surface was (still is?) covered with snow:
From Wikipedia: