🗣️ Dogs Know Multiple Languages?! Believe it.

Dogs are breaking down language barriers.

Hola? Bonjour? Konnichiwa? Your dog is keeping up even if you may not be…

Brain scans from 18 dogs showed that some areas of the pups’ brains lit up differently depending on whether the dog was hearing words from a familiar language or a different one, according to a report published in NeuroImage. Ipso facto, your dog knows when someone is speaking your native tongue or a foreign language.

“Dogs are really good in the human environment,” said study author Laura Cuaya, a postdoctoral researcher at the Neuroethology of Communication Lab in Budapest, Hungary.

“We found that they know more than I expected about human language,” Cuaya said. “Certainly, this ability to be constant social learners gives them an advantage as a species — it gives them a better understanding of their environment.”

So my dog knows when someone is speaking French?

Not exactly. Dogs appear to recognize their owners’ native language based on how it sounds overall, since the experiments did not use words the dogs would have been familiar with.

Is it the same way we interpret someone speaking in a foreign language?

Well, kind of…

To take a closer look at whether dogs have the same kind of innate ability to differentiate between languages that human infants do, the researchers turned to a group of pet dogs ranging in age from 3 to 11. The native language of 16 of the dogs was Hungarian and Spanish for the other two.

In their experiments, Cuaya and her colleagues had a native Hungarian speaker and a native Spanish speaker read sentences from Chapter 21 of “The Little Prince” while the dogs were in an MRI scanner. The text and the readers were unknown to all the dogs.

When Cuaya and her colleagues compared the MRI scans from the readings in the two languages, the researchers found different activity patterns in two areas of the brain that have been associated in both humans and dogs with deciphering the meaning of speech and whether its emotional content is positive or negative. The differences were more pronounced in older dogs and dogs with longer snouts.

I have a big nose. Does that make me more keen to learn a new language?

No. They’re still hypothesizing on why dogs with longer snouts were better at distinguishing the languages. Want to know the current theory? They think the explanation for longer-snouted dogs might be that that head shape is common among sheep dogs, who have to be able to understand what a shepherd is saying to the dog. That all being said, Cuaya suspects the older dogs had a different result because they had more years listening to the native language of their owners.

Ok, so what should I take away from this?

“As many owners already know, dogs are social beings interested in what is happening in their social world,” Cuaya said. “Our results show that dogs learn from their social environments, even when we don’t teach them directly. So, just continue involving your dogs in your family, and give them opportunities to continue learning.”

So, maybe weave in that high school Spanish at the dog park… comprende?

Robodogs are getting…smarter? 👀

Someday, when quakes, fires, and floods strike, the first responders might be packs of robotic rescue dogs rushing in to help stranded souls.

These battery-powered quadrupeds would use computer vision to size up obstacles and employ doglike agility skills to get past them.

Yeah but this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Robodogs…

…but the advancements have been mindblowing.

AI researchers at Stanford University and Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute say they have developed a new vision-based algorithm that helps robodogs scale high objects, leap across gaps, crawl under thresholds, and squeeze through crevices – and then bolt to the next challenge. The algorithm represents the brains of the robodog.

“The autonomy and range of complex skills that our quadruped robot learned is quite impressive,” said Chelsea Finn, assistant professor of computer science and senior author of a new peer-reviewed paper announcing the teams’ approach to the world, which will be presented at the upcoming Conference on Robot Learning. “And we have created it using low-cost, off-the-shelf robots – actually, two different off-the-shelf robots.”

The key advance, the authors say, is that their robodog is autonomous – that is, it is able to size up physical challenges and imagine, then execute, a broad range of agility skills based simply on the obstacles it sees before it.

So, when do we cut them loose?

The team performed extensive experiments using real-world robodogs to demonstrate their new agility approach in especially challenging environments using only those robodogs’ off-the-shelf computers, visual sensors, and power systems.

In raw numbers, the new-and-improved robodogs were able to climb obstacles more than one-and-a-half times their height, leap gaps greater than one-and-a-half times their length, crawl beneath barriers three-quarters of their height, and tilt themselves in order to squeeze through a slit thinner than their width.

Next up, the team hopes to leverage advances in 3D vision and graphics to add real-world data to its simulated environments to bring a new level of real-world autonomy to their algorithm.

It won’t be long until they’re racing into burning buildings. These “robo best friends” may very well be the reason a firefighter or police officer makes it home to their family one day.

Overheard at a coffee shop:

🚨 Attention Chonkers! 🚨

“The Squeeze”: Dog News In 60 Seconds

• 🎵 Drake dropped his new album For All the Dogs, and not one dog has listened to it.

• 🏆 The ASPCA’s “Dog of the Year” award has been announced. Just don’t bother congratulating Cole. He can’t hear you.

• 🇺🇸 President Biden’s dog, Commander, has been excused from the White House after a string of biting incidents…

• 🐕 …so what causes a dog to want to bite someone? This trainer spills the tea.

• 🪖 As for other American institutions, the Pentagon is in the dog house after an official is charged with running a dogfighting ring.

• 😲 A puppy with 6 legs?! Yep…and she was abandoned in a parking lot…until a rescue was able to save her.

Today’s Last Laugh:

pee-yew.

@lolatherainbowdog

Yeah ok it was pretty bad ngl #dog #funny #funnyvideos #fart