Dogs also recognize their owner solely on the basis of their voice

As you can read in ELTE's announcement on Wednesday, it is not disputed that our dog recognizes us. But can he do it without the help of sight and smell, only on the basis of our voice? And if so, how?

To find out, the researchers of the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University invited 28 host-dog pairs to the laboratory, where they had to hide. The dogs had to find one of the two hiding places where the farmer was hiding, while in the other place a stranger hid.

From the farmer’s hiding place, the farmer’s voice was played from the recording as he reads recipes in a neutral tone, while from another location a foreign voice spoke.

The dogs had to find their owner, but they already had to choose between the two hiding places. The game consisted of several rounds, during which, in addition to the sound of the farmer, 14 different alien recordings could be heard. There were also sounds that were more similar and more different to the sound of the farmer.

Dogs found their owners in 82 percent of cases. According to the announcement, to make sure the dogs didn’t rely on their sense of smell to solve the task, they swapped the plays in the last two rounds and played the farmer’s voice from the side where the stranger hid. Even then, the dogs followed the sound, indicating that their noses were not used in the rehearsals.

The researchers also looked at exactly what helped the dogs choose their voices.

People mostly use three sound characteristics to distinguish the sound of speakers: pitch (higher or deeper), noise (clearer or louder), and tone (less bumpy or bumpy). "If two voices differ in an important feature that matters to dogs, it will be easier for them to decide who the voice belongs to," explained Anna Gábor, the first author of the study.

How long a dog looked at the owner's voice before the election indicated how confident he was about it. It turned out that the greater the difference between the pitch and noise of the host and the stranger, the more it helped the dogs recognize who was speaking, while the tone and other sound characteristics did not help in the decision.
"For the first time, dogs have been shown to recognize their owner's voice among many other voices. In addition, we have shown that dogs use the sound features used by humans, but not all of them," said Attila Andics, Head of the Neuroethology Research Group.

(Source: marmalade.co.uk; MTI | Image: pixabay.com)