Bioscience: Dogs found to understand categories of objects

Border collie Arya, lives in Italy

Owners can't say "pizza" out loud because she 

understands the category food, loves pizza and goes nuts

A SciAm article discusses the finding that dogs recognize categories of objects, which human toddlers do. These dogs extend words to new objects based on function the way children do in early language learning. In a study published in Current Biology, owners of 10 talented dogs taught their talented dogs words for objects in two categories: tug toys, called “pulls,” and fetch toys, called “throws.” All toys were different in size, shape and color so appearance could not guide learning.

The article comments:

After four weeks of training, brand-new toys with a variety of designs were introduced. This time the dogs only experienced each toy’s function, either tugging or fetching, during play; they were not taught words for any of them. After a week of play, when asked to fetch a pull or a throw, the seven dogs that completed all experimental phases chose the right toy about two thirds of the time—well above the 12.5 percent expected for selections by chance. “These gifted word-learner dogs not only are able to memorize the labels of many different objects but also can extend a familiar word to new objects that share the same function, even if they look very different,” says Claudia Fugazza, the study’s lead author and an ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. 

Fugazza emphasizes that these animals are exceptional; most family dogs never build such vocabularies. She says she was surprised by the dogs’ ease and flexibility in applying words by function, akin to how human children begin extending their vocabularies through everyday exposure.

10 gifted word-learner dogs, eight border collies, one blue heeler, one Labrador retriever and one Welsh corgi pembroke, participated in the experiment (hm . . . . . wait a minnit . . . . . that's 11 not 10 . . . . . . ?)

By Germaine: The science guy . . . . and the politics guy . . . . . . and the Pxy guy . . . . . etc.