Add like
Add dislike
Add to saved papers

The cocktail party effect in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris).

Animal Cognition 2019 March 9
Like humans, canine companions often find themselves in noisy environments, and are expected to respond to human speech despite potential distractors. Such environments pose particular problems for young children, who have limited linguistic knowledge. Here, we examined whether dogs show similar difficulties. We found that dogs prefer their name to a stress-matched foil in quiet conditions, despite hearing it spoken by a novel talker. They continued to prefer their name in the presence of multitalker human speech babble at signal-to-noise levels as low as 0 dB, when their name was the same intensity as the foil. This surpasses the performance of 1-year-old infants, who fail to prefer their name to a foil at 0 dB (Newman in Dev Psychol 41(2):352-362, 2005). Overall, we find better performance at name recognition in dogs that were trained to do tasks for humans, like service dogs, search-and-rescue dogs, and explosives detection dogs. These dogs were of several different breeds, and their tasks were widely different from one another. This suggests that their superior performance may be due to generally more training and better attention. In summary, these results demonstrate that dogs can recognize their name even in relatively difficult levels of multitalker babble, and that dogs who work with humans are especially adept at name recognition in comparison with companion dogs. Future studies will explore the effect of different types of background noise on word recognition in dogs.

Full text links

We have located links that may give you full text access.
Can't access the paper?
Try logging in through your university/institutional subscription. For a smoother one-click institutional access experience, please use our mobile app.

For the best experience, use the Read mobile app

Mobile app image

Get seemless 1-tap access through your institution/university

For the best experience, use the Read mobile app

All material on this website is protected by copyright, Copyright © 1994-2024 by WebMD LLC.
This website also contains material copyrighted by 3rd parties.

By using this service, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy.

Your Privacy Choices Toggle icon

You can now claim free CME credits for this literature searchClaim now

Get seemless 1-tap access through your institution/university

For the best experience, use the Read mobile app