Dogs Can Recognize Their Owners Just By Their Voices, New Study Show How

Dogs can recognize their owners by their voices alone and they do so using some of the same acoustic cues that humans use, a new study has found.

In their study, published in Animal Cognition, a team of researchers from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary sought to find out whether dogs can recognize their owners from their voice, and if they can, do they "rely on the same acoustic parameters" that humans use to distinguish between speakers.

The researchers conducted an experiment wherein 28 dog-owner pairs played a game of hide-and-seek, Eötvös Loránd University noted in a news release. The dogs represented various breeds, with some of them being purebreds and others of mixed breed.

For the test phase, the dogs had to find their owner, who was hiding behind a non-transparent spot in a corner of the laboratory, while a stranger was also hiding in another spot. The researchers then played a recording of the owner's and the stranger's voices, both in a neutral tone, on a loudspeaker from their hiding places.

They played the game for several rounds, with the owners being paired with different strangers' voices, some of which were quite similar to the owner's voices, while others were not.

"Dogs chose their owner's voice more often than that of control persons,' suggesting that they can identify it," the researchers wrote. In fact, dogs chose their owners' voices in 82% of the cases.

There were also olfaction control rounds wherein the researchers played the owners' voices from the hiding spot of the stranger, and the dogs still chose their owners' voices. This shows their sense of smell was not a factor in their choice, the researchers said.

So what is it that helps dogs recognize their owner's voices? Study lead author, Anna Gábor of Eötvös Loránd University, explained that humans usually use pitch, noisiness and timbre to distinguish between people. Evidently, dogs also use some of these cues, with the pitch and noisiness of the voices helping them to determine who was talking. However, timbre and other voice properties did not help.

"These findings reveal that dogs use some but probably not all acoustic parameters that humans use to identify speakers," the researchers wrote. "Although dogs can detect fine changes in speech, their perceptual system may not be fully attuned to identity-diagnostic cues in the human voice."