In a groundbreaking study, researchers from Hungary have unveiled that dogs can recognize their owners’ voices using pre-recorded speech. This discovery highlights the potential for advanced communication between humans and their canine companions.
In a pioneering experiment, researchers at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) Department of Ethology in Hungary have demonstrated that dogs are capable of recognizing their owners based on pre-recorded speech. This study, published in the journal Animal Behaviour, marks the first evidence that dogs can identify individual humans through their voices.
“Previous studies demonstrated that dogs are sensitive to certain acoustic cues in the human voice, they can recognize the sex of the speaker and distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar voices. Whether dogs are capable of voice-based individual-level recognition of humans had not been demonstrated before this experiment,” Kinga Surányi, a doctoral student involved in the research, said in a news release.
The study involved inviting three members of the same dog-owning family to participate. Each dog attended with their three owners, all of whom were equally familiar to the dog.
The researchers recorded the owners’ voices and then played back these recordings through loudspeakers placed behind the owners. Without any physical cues from the owners, each dog had to identify which voice belonged to which owner among all 31 participating dogs.
The dogs were tested 18 times each, solely relying on their auditory recognition skills. The results were telling.
“Dogs performed well; they chose more often and looked longer at the person whose voice they heard. Dogs’ performance was above chance for all family members, indicating that they could recognize all of them based on voice. Furthermore, dogs’ performance was the best when they heard their main owner’s voice. This could be because dogs most frequently had vocal interactions with the main owner and were most likely to need to react to their voice,” added Anna Gábor, a postdoctoral researcher at the ELTE Neuroethology of Communication Lab.
This finding is significant for several reasons. Historically, individual-level voice recognition had only been documented in rhesus macaques and horses. Demonstrating this ability in dogs highlights the complex auditory processing capabilities of our canine companions and underscores the significance of the human-dog bond.
The ability to recognize human voices could enhance communication between dogs and their owners, particularly in scenarios where visual cues are limited.
“Dogs can discriminate between familiar human voices and match the voices to the corresponding person. This ability seems to be beneficial for communication between different species as well,” added Surányi.
“The study shows that dogs do know a lot about human voices: not only if they heard it before or not, but also who that voice belongs to,” Gábor added. “Future research will need to clarify whether this is a general ability among mammals or the result of specific evolutionary adaptations in certain species to whom humans are especially important.”
The research highlights the ongoing evolution of the understanding of animal cognition and interspecies communication, suggesting the deep-rooted and intricate relationships humans have with dogs.