When every call of “Spot, come!” sends your dog running in the opposite direction, it’s easy to be cynical about how well canines listen. But a new study shows dogs and even puppies are capable of understanding subtle and indirect cues in human voices, a finding with implications for how dogs came to be deeply attuned to human behavior.

The study found that dogs of all shapes and sizes could home in on a treat based entirely on the direction in which a hidden human was speaking. Human babies can do the same, but our clever cousins the chimpanzees can’t, according to a 2012 study.

“The message of this study is not that chimps are stupid and dogs are smart,” said lead study author Federico Rossano of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “What it tells us is that dogs pay special attention to communicative signals from humans. … That’s a sign of how connected we are.”

In the test, a hidden experimenter sat close to the empty box but faced the box holding the food and called, “Oh look, look there, this is great!” Instead of heading for the box close to the source of the voice, the dogs trotted over to the food-laden box the experimenter was speaking toward. So the animals seemed to understand that the human was talking about one of the boxes, rather than summoning the dog to the food, and the dogs interpreted the direction of speech to figure out the location of the box with the treat.

Adult dogs did well at this task, but puppies only 8 to 14 weeks old did even better – if they had spent plenty of time with people. Puppies that had lived mostly with their litter mates, on the other hand, flubbed the test. These results show that dogs need some kind of learning – perhaps in the form of socialization with people — to pick up the clues embedded in a human voice, Rossano says. The ability of such young dogs to do so well suggests dogs have a genetic predisposition to focus on humans and the signals they convey, the researchers said.

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