How can species as far apart as dogs and humans understand each other?

The Institut Pasteur has just issued a press release on the study conducted by researchers from the University of Geneva, the Institut de l'Audition and the CRPN Marseille  in collaboration with Thierry Legou (LPL), published in the journal PLOS Biology in October:

 Reference: Déaux EC, Piette T, Gaunet F, Legou T, Arnal L, Giraud A-L (2024) Dog-human vocal interactions match dogs' sensory-motor tuning. PLoS Biol 22(10): e3002789.

Full text article: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002789

This study ‘reveals that the pair meet halfway between their differences to communicate together. From their results, the researchers hypothesise that dogs and humans have co-adapted to be able to communicate together. Comparison with other canids that have not been domesticated by humans, such as wolves, would reveal which of the dog's linguistic abilities are due to its genetics and which are due to its socialisation’.

 

Crédits : Thierry Legou, LPL

 

Referential communication in dogs through the prism of acoustic analysis

The 50th Colloquium of the French Society for the Study of Animal Behavior (SFECA) will take place on May 31 and June 1 in Marseille (online). It is organized by local research laboratories, including the LPL.

On this occasion, Thierry Legou, CNRS research engineer at the LPL, will present an oral communication within the framework of the “Social Cognition” section entitled “Do dog vocalize differently towards their owner and food in an unsolvable task? An exploratory study ”.

Summary of the intervention:
The dog is an interesting study model in terms of comparative cognition with humans and referential or interspecies communication - especially dog-human communication - since he has lived with us for over 30,000 years. Our study consists of evaluating the dog's referential communication in the presence of a human (their master) and a target (food). The types of vocalizations of the dog during the experiment as well as their acoustic characteristics were analyzed to determine if these vocalizations are different when they are produced to the master or to the target.

Registration deadline for the conference: May 10, 2021