Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think: Study Shows

Dogs might not have been deemed the smartest creatures, yet scientists have found that America's favorite pet can actually work to understand what we say.

"Although we cannot say how much or in what way dogs understand information in speech from our study, we can say that dogs react to both verbal and speaker-related information and that these components appear to be processed in different areas of the dog's brain," said lead study author Victoria Ratcliffe of the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex, in a news release.

During the study, researchers worked to investigate whether dogs show brain hemispheric biases in response to the information transmitted in human speech. Previous studies show that dogs use their left-brain when processing the vocalization sounds of other dogs.

They exposed dogs to human speech as sounds entered each of the ears at the same time and with the same amplitude.

"The input from each ear is mainly transmitted to the opposite hemisphere of the brain," Ratcliffe said. "If one hemisphere is more specialized in processing certain information in the sound, then that information is perceived as coming from the opposite ear."

They found that if the dog turned to its left, it typically meant that the left ear heard the sound more prominently than the right and vice versa.

Findings revealed that dogs showed a left-hemisphere processing bias if they were exposed to familiar spoken commands in which the meaningful components of the words were made more obvious. Yet they showed significant right-hemisphere bias when the intonation or speaker-related vocal cues were exaggerated.

Researchers said they believe that these findings suggest that dogs can understand that "not only to who we are and how we say things, but also to what we say," according to Ratcliffe.

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal Current Biology.