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ERP evidence for object label understanding in family dogs
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Poster D81 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Marianna Boros1*, Lilla Magyari1,2,3*, Boglárka Morvai1, Raúl Hernández-Pérez1, Attila Andics1,4; 1Neuroethology of Communication Lab, Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 2Norwegian Reading Centre for Reading Education and Research, Faculty of Arts and Education, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, 3Department of Social Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, 4ELTE NAP Canine Brain Research Group, 5* these authors contributed equally to this work
The extent to which non-human animals are capable of understanding communication about the external entities in their environment has received considerable attention in comparative research. Dogs have been extensively selected for their abilities to communicate with humans and nowadays, more than ever, they live immersed in the human socio-linguistic environment. Therefore, they provide a unique case to study referentiality in a non-human animal. Whereas their ability to understand referential communication has been widely tested using pointing and gazing, whether this understanding extends from human nonverbal to verbal communication is controversial. fMRI studies provide emerging evidence for lexical processing in dogs, at least for praise words. Yet, recent behavioural studies indicate that typical family dogs perform at chance level when tested on their ability to match object labels to their referents, even after extensive training, and that only a handful of dogs are capable of acquiring a large vocabulary of object labels. However, human and animal studies indicate that using only performance measures may be insensitive to capture implicit knowledge effects, thus neuroscientific measures could be more adequate to demonstrate dogs’ passive understanding of object labels. Here we used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure dogs’ event-related responses (ERPs) in a violation of expectation paradigm, by presenting them matching or mismatching objects after hearing presumably known object labels. Stimuli were personalized for each dog (N=19). We found a significant difference in dogs' brain responses between the match and the mismatch conditions, characterized by a temporal dynamics comparable to the human semantic N400 effect, which is widely regarded to be an index of semantic processing. Our results provide the first neural evidence that even dogs whose name-to-object matching behaviour remains at chance may understand that words can refer to specific objects.
Topic Areas: Animal Communication and Comparative/Evolutionary Studies, Meaning: Lexical Semantics