Dogs understand praise the same way we do. Here's why that matters.

Every dog owner knows that saying Good dog! in a happy, high-pitched voice will evoke a flurry of joyful tail wagging in their pet. That made scientists curious: What exactly happens in your dog's brain when it hears praise, and is it similar to the hierarchical way our own brain processes such acoustic information? When a person gets a compliment, the more primitive, subcortical auditory regions first reacts to the intonation--the emotional force of spoken words. Next, the brain taps the more recently evolved auditory cortex to figure out the meaning of the words, which is learned. In 2016, a team of scientists discovered that dogs' brains, like those of humans, compute the intonation and meaning of a word separately--although dogs use their right brain hemisphere to do so, whereas we use our left hemisphere.