June 2, 2026
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 […]
June 2, 2026
Dogs not only process the sound form of words but also encode their meaning in a way similar to humans, a recent fMRI study by Hungarian […]
October 22, 2025
The ability to detect vocal sounds, and the more specialized skill of recognizing calls from one’s own species, is supported by evolutionarily ancient brain mechanisms, according […]
April 15, 2025
A new brain imaging study from the ELTE NAP Canine Brain Research group has revealed that age and brain shape affect how strongly olfactory brain regions […]
December 17, 2024
Researchers at ELTE Department of Ethology, Hungary designed an experiment to investigate whether dogs can recognize their owners based on pre-recorded speech. The results provided the […]
July 10, 2024
Researchers at ELTE Department of Ethology in Budapest compared how companion dogs and companion miniature pigs from all over the world reacted to human emotional vocalizations. […]
July 10, 2024
Researchers at the ELTE Department of Ethology in Budapest investigated whether an infant-mother analog attachment bond arises in intensively human-socialized companion pigs towards their owners similar […]
March 22, 2024
It’s no surprise that dogs can learn to understand and respond to human words. Your dog can learn to sit when you say “sit” and come when called. But a new study has made the surprising discovery by recording brain activity that dogs generally also know that certain words “stand for” certain objects. When they hear those words, they activate a matching mental representation in their minds. The findings are reported in Current Biology on March 22, 2024.
March 20, 2023
In a new comparative fMRI study, Hungarian researchers at the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University have found that both dogs’ and humans’ brain show a general tuning to voicelikeness, that is, to sounds characterized by the complex acoustic properties of natural vocalizations. The paper that was published in Neuroimage suggests that a general sensitivity to voice-like stimuli is an ancient trait of the auditory system of the mammalian brain.