How Dogs Process Human Words
Humans are introduced to rudimentary neural representations at a young age in order to possess basic abilities to thrive in this world of communication, but when scientists conduct a study on dogs to see if they understand the human language, the outcome can be surprising to some. When you are playing with your dog outside and say, “go fetch!”, is your dog reacting because it knows you are saying an action or reacting because they can interpret the meaning of your words? This theory was tested by studies to discover just how closely dogs can understand commonly used human words. There are different levels of the abilities that dogs possess in order to process words. When intrigued in researching articles about how animals, specifically dogs, can react when hearing the human language, I found my tertiary source article named, “How Do Dogs Process Words”. This provided all the necessary information to give me a general idea of the way dogs are processing words. The article source, Awake FMRI/ phMRI became my secondary source article which talked of the medical tools used to test exactly what goes through a dog’s brain when processing what humans are saying. This article finally linked me to my primary source, The Frontiers in Neuroscience article, “Awake FMRI Reveals Brain Regions for Novel Word Detection in Dogs” that consisted of facts which explained the specific process of how it was found that dogs are surely able to indicate human words to support this scientific study. I was able to compare and contrast how all of my articles gave me a better understanding of each other. I did so by going as far as three articles from the first one that I found to get the information that I wanted. The tertiary article was broken down in the secondary source in order to help my difficulty in understanding my primary source.
How do dogs process words by Eleanor Imster was the first source that I came across when becoming intrigued in finding information about the process in which animals take to translate words. Approaching this article with ignorance is not the best option because it has little to no detail or evidence. Therefore, if believing in this article you would only have a basic level of understanding. This article became my tertiary article because of the minimal facts that’s it consisted of. One of the reasons why this article was exceptionally difficult in being supportive because the words used were very simple and unadvanced in comparison to my primary article. For example, in this tertiary article it was said, “The researchers hypothesize that the dogs may show greater neural activation to a new, unknown word because they sense their owners want them to understand what they are saying, and they are trying to do so”(Eleanor Imster, How do dogs process words?). That in comparison to Frontiers in Neuroscience saying, “The neural regions responsible for target detection and novelty processing not only include primary sensory areas associated with the stimulus modality, but also recruit broader areas such as the posterior cingulate, inferior and middle frontal gyri, superior and middle temporal gyri, amygdala, thalamus, and lateral occipital cortex”(Linden et al., 1999; Kiehl et al., 2001; Brazdil et al., 2005; Goldman et al., 2009; Cacciaglia et al., 2015). This shows the obvious difference between the two articles and what kind of detail that they both will provide. In the tertiary article it is more simplified than the primary article.
When finding my first article, which was not the original source, I noticed that it was underdeveloped and limited with details. It is underdeveloped for the reason that it says things like, “Dogs may show greater neural activation to a new, unknown word because they sense their owners want them to understand what they are saying, and they are trying to do so”( Gregory Berns, The Dog Project, 2012). I found myself attempting to find a link to another source in order to gain more information about the study. This writing became easily the most significant to help me to connect my other two articles. Published by Frontiers in Neuroscience on 15 October 2018, the article “Awake FMRI Reveals Brain Regions for Novel Word Detection in Dogs”, became my primary article. This reading depicted a clear reasoning for the theory that dogs can understand human words. This was my most informative and factual article. Medical studies were used with lexis in order to provide scientific evidence. Searchlight multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) revealed that a subset of dogs had clusters of informative voxels that discriminated between words( Frontiers in Neuroscience. “Awake FMRI Reveals Brain Regions for Novel Word Detection in Dogs”, by Paul E. Phillips, 1st para). The question is if dogs are understanding what you say or understanding the cue for the command((Fukuzawa et al., 2005; Mills, 2015; Müller et al., 2015; Persson et al., 2015; D’Aniello et al., 2016). This article as my primary article had the most information translated in a technical way. It solemnly became my most important source. I found it necessary that I found other resources from my first essay to provide me lexis. One of those sources was the “Awake fMRI/ phMRI”. This became my secondary source. It was the key to translating the meanings of many of the terms used in my other two sources. This source had medical terms that gave understanding to the difficult to read terms in the other two articles. With this key- like source I was able to adjust to the reading more efficiently. I also was able to approach the main point that the writer was attempting to get across in an easier way. This overall helped me to connect my articles in order to write a better essay.
In conclusion, I was able to compare and contrast how all of my articles gave me a better understanding of each other. In this essay I wanted to get the point across that it is important to trace back as far as you can in order to get the necessary information that is needed. It is important to not go for the immediate source that you find because that source usually has botched information provided by the original, more scientific
source. Many writings may not accommodate a reader, but it is recommended to learn how to accommodate the reading by finding other supporting articles.