Forget that old saying that dogs are “man’s best friend,” because new research suggests it’s women they’re paying attention to. A new study from Hungary finds that dogs are more likely to listen to women than men, for an interesting reason.
Researchers did a series of brain scans on family dogs while people were talking to them and found the pups show greater brain sensitivity to speech directed at them than to speech directed at people. And their brains responded even more when it was a woman talking. It seems the sing-song voice people often use to talk to babies to get their attention - otherwise known as baby talk - also works well on the family pet.
Study author Anna Gergely explains that the increased sensitivity in dogs’ brains to dog-directed speech from women may be because women tend to talk to dogs using baby talk more than men do. Previous research has found that infants’ brains are tuned in to this style of speech, but this is the first study to show that dogs really are sensitive to the way people talk to them.
Source: Daily Mail