Dogs Pay More Attention to Women Than Men, Scientists Say

Scientists have found that dogs may pay more attention to women than men when they are spoken to directly.

Hungarian researchers at the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University, the Research Centre for Natural Sciences and the Eötvös Loránd Research Network conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on a trained dog to reach these findings. The findings are laid out in a new study in Communications Biology.

During the scan, the trained dog, while conscious, listened to the voices of 12 women and 12 men in real-life interactions with dogs, children and other adults.

"Studying how dog brains process dog-directed speech is exciting, because it can help us understand how exaggerated prosody contributes to efficient speech processing in a nonhuman species skilled at relying on different speech cues (e.g. follow verbal commands)," Anna Gergely, co-first author of the study said in a press release.

The researchers found that the dogs had a greater brain sensitivity to women speaking in these scenarios. Overall, dogs relate to the way adults interact with children who have "limited linguistic competence," according to the study.

They determined from the research that dogs responded better to dog- and child-directed speech, rather than speech directed at adults, showing evidence that dogs are indeed able to pay attention to speech that is directed towards them.

Scientists already knew that dogs are able to understand body language, tone of voice and certain words. While some experts believe that dogs are not able to comprehend full sentences, they clearly do understand certain words such as "walk."

Why the dogs were more sensitive to women is not understood at this time.

"What makes this result particularly interesting is that in dogs, as opposed to infants, this sensitivity cannot be explained by either ancient responsiveness to conspecific signals or by intrauterine exposure to women's voice," Anna Gábor, co-first author of the study said in the release.

"Remarkably, the voice tone patterns characterizing women's dog-directed speech are not typically used in dog-dog communication—our results may thus serve evidence for a neural preference that dogs developed during their domestication," she said.

"Dog brains' increased sensitivity to dog-directed speech spoken by women specifically may be due to the fact that women more often speak to dogs with exaggerated prosody than men."

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