Do we think dogs understand us?

Everyone who has dogs is used to talking to them, but can they really understand what you're saying? Even a single word? To examine people's perceptions of their dog's understanding Pongracz, Miklosi and Csanyi (2001) gave Hungarian dog-owners a questionnaire. It asked them to rate the types of utterances they thought their dogs could understand. Top of the list came questions, followed by permissions and information giving. It seems these dogs are regular little Lassies.

But what proof is there that they really understand? Well, we can only tell by how the dog responds. So, next the authors asked dog-owners how often their dogs demonstrated understanding by obeying a command. Our hardy Hungarian dog-owners reckoned:

• Dogs obeyed 31% of the time under all circumstances.
• Dogs obeyed 53% of the time when the context was right

Seems pretty high to me. Or perhaps Hungarian dogs are very smart.

Ivan Pavlov and his dogs

Ivan Petroitch Pavlov was born in Ryazan, in Russia in the year of 1849. His father was a village priest and his mother was a physiologist.

After a brilliant academic path in the area of Natural Sciences and Phyiology, in 1878 was admitted to the Academy of Medical Surgery.  After that we won a fellowship at the Academy were we developed his thesis on the subject of "The centrifugal nerves of the heart".

Ten year later, Pavlov started the studies about digestion and the gastric function, first on dogs and later on children. This study was centered on the externalizing of the salivary gland to collecting, measure and analyse of the saliva and what response it had to food, under a several distinct conditions.

The reflex system of Pavlov, known as "Conditioned Reflex" was a big stemp in the areas of physiology and neurological science, since it showed that all temperaments types responde to a stimuli the same way. This is a psychology theory that is still teached nowadays in school.

Here's how Pavlov Theory works: