New Scientist
Image: Rennett Stowe
Barking dogs might be better communicators than we thought, according to a new study.
Computer software can distinguish individual dogs by their barks, and also suggests that certain barks act as a “universal language”, carrying information about the dog’s mind-set that is readily understood by their fellow pooches.
Csaba Molnár and his colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, recorded 14 Hungarian sheepdogs barking in a range of situations: when approached by a stranger, during play, during a fight, and when the dog was alone.
Then they fed the sound recordings into an artificial neural network developed by a team led by Frédéric Kaplan at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
The artificial neural network identified key audio features of each bark and Molnár’s team found that the computer software could identify the situation in which a bark was recorded. Read more on newscientist.com…
