Infants Understand Different Dog Barks

According to a new scientific study, infants just six months old have the ability to distinguish between the meaning of various types of dog barks, despite having limited or no contact with the animals previous to the experiments. The investigation revealed that the youngsters could positively associate angry snarls and friendly yaps to pictures of dogs displaying either friendly or threatening body language, which is indeed remarkable, the team behind the study believes.

Behind the new paper is the same team of lab investigators from the Brigham Young University that recently discovered the fact that children of about the same age had the ability to discern between moods in Beethoven's music. Once again, they have proven that, even before children learn how to speak or walk, they are able to comprehend, process, and respond to a large number of external stimuli. The investigation may reveal new insight into how small humans learn so much so fast.

“Emotion is one of the first things babies pick up on in their social world. We chose dogs because they are highly communicative creatures both in their posture and the nature of their bark,” BYU's Ross Flom, a psychology professor, and the lead author of the new study, explains. The paper accompanying it appears in the latest issue of the scientific journal Developmental Psychology. The team, made up of Flom and two graduate students, also says that the babies were undisturbed by the study, which is very peculiar, because children tend to be scared of dogs' aggressive behavior from a certain age on.

During the study, babies watched two images of the same canine. In one, it was exhibiting a friendly posture, while in the other, it looked menacing. After the pictures were displayed, experts played back sound clips of recorded barks, in random order, and observed the behavior of the children. Even if they were just six months old, they stared at the picture that was correctly associated with the type of bark they heard in the speakers, ScienceDaily informs.