3 Recent Discoveries Have Upended Scientists’ Understanding of How Dogs Age, Navigate, and Perceive Human Speech

Business Insider / Aylin Woodward / Sept. 7, 2020

Let’s hear it for the good boys!

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Dogs Use the Magnetic Field To Navigate

Dogs have an uncanny ability to find their way home using their sense of smell. But that’s not the only navigational tool at their disposal: Pups can also orient themselves using Earth’s magnetic field, according to a June study.Birds, whales, and dolphins also use the same sixth sense, called magnetoreception, to plot their long migrations.

“The magnetic field may provide dogs with a ‘universal’ reference frame, which is essential for long-distance navigation, and arguably, the most important component that is ‘missing’ from our current understanding of mammalian special behavior and cognition,” the authors of the recent study wrote.

The researchers used GPS trackers to study how 27 dogs navigated 662 expeditions from 2014 to 2017 in the Czech Republic. They chose hunting breeds like terriers and dachshunds, which are trained to find prey like foxes in dense woodlands and then find their way back to their owners.

The researchers found that after the dogs were released into the woods, the animals typically retraced their steps back to their release point by following their own scent. But in one-third of the expeditions, the dogs took a different way home: On those trips, most of the dogs started off by running for 65 feet along Earth’s north-south axis — even if the direction of their destination didn’t align with that orientation.

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Dogs Understand Speech in the Same Way We Do

When humans hear someone speak, our brains divide the work of processing that communication between their left and right hemispheres.

First, the right hemisphere focuses on parsing out the speaker’s underlying tone, and then the left hemisphere processes the meaning of what we’ve heard.

Researchers discovered in 2014 that dogs’ brains divvy up the task of speech processing in the same way, between their left and right hemispheres, though the scientists weren’t sure of the order in which that happened.

The recent study, however, found that dogs understand tone first, then meaning, in the same order as humans. The authors examined the brain activity of 12 pet dogs — six border collies, five golden retrievers, and one German shepherd — using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine.