LONDON: Human's inclination to invest dogs with human-like states of mind isn't as unscientific as it might appear for scientists are now suggesting that canines are becoming more intelligent and are even learning morals.
Studies presented at the first Canine Science Forum in Budapest, Hungary, backs the idea that the descendants of grey wolves have become more intelligent, and even learnt a sense of right and wrong, the New Scientist journal reported.
"Dogs show a strong aversion to inequity. I would prefer not to call it a sense of fairness, but others might," said Dr Friederike Range, of the University of Vienna, who led the study.
Through experiments done with children and dogs, Prof Ludwig Huber and colleagues at the University supported the idea that dogs have a rudimentary "theory of mind."
During one study, dogs which held up a paw were rewarded with a food treat.
When a lone dog was asked to raise its paw but received no treat, the researchers found it begged for up to 30 minutes.
But when they tested two dogs together but rewarded only one, the dog which missed out soon stopped playing
the game.
Scientists argue that the fact that rough-and-tumble dog play rarely escalates into full-blown fighting shows that the animals abide by social rules and expect others to do the same. In other words, they know right from wrong.
They possess a moral compass too, in order to negotiate the complex social world of people, adds Prof Marc Bekoff from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
According to the journal, Dr Peter Pongracz from Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, and colleagues have produced evidence that dog barks contain information which people can understand.
They found each of the different types of bark has distinct patterns of frequency, tonality and pulsing, and that an artificial neural network can use these features to correctly identify a bark it has never encountered before.
This is further evidence that barking conveys information about a dog's mental state, reports New Scientist magazine.
They found even people who have never owned a dog can recognise the emotional 'meaning' of barks produced in various situations, such as when playing, left alone and confronted by a stranger.
His team has now developed a computer program that can aggregate hundreds of barks recorded in various settings and boil them down to their basic acoustic ingredients.
They also discovered people can correctly identify aggregated barks as conveying happiness, loneliness or aggression.
'Even children from the age of six who have never had a dog recognise these patterns,' says Dr Pongracz.
Dogs are not just able to 'speak' to us--they can also understand some aspects of human communication.
Meanwhile, Dr Akiko Takaoka from Kyoto University in Japan has described as-yet unpublished work that examined what is going on inside a dog's mind when it hears a stranger's voice.
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