“Bring me the leash!” For a dog to be able to associate the term with the object, a certain amount of training is necessary. Researchers have now explored the minimum. Especially clever four-legged friends can remember new words, at least for a short time, after hearing them only four times. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent the ability of dogs to learn quickly is linked to the predisposition or rather to a routine in memorizing words.
Man’s best friend can always astonish us with his sharp mind. In addition to their many talents, dogs are known to have the ability to link spoken words with certain behaviors or objects: They learn to understand what we expect of them when we say “Sit!”, “Sit down!” Or “get them for me Slippers! ”Say. In this context, the border collie “Rico” became particularly famous, having demonstrated his talent for connecting words with objects in the television program “Wetten dass?”, Among others: He had learned the names of over 200 toys. Afterwards, Rico also gave scientists insights into these skills.
Dogs with vocabulary in their sights
Researchers working with Claudia Fugazza from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest have once again devoted a study to dog vocabulary learning. Her focus was on the question of how quickly and under what conditions the animals can link concepts to objects. Up until now it was assumed that the four-legged friends would only memorize words after a comparatively extensive training. The ability to make connections very quickly, on the other hand, is considered to be a typical human talent in connection with their complex language skills. Fugazza and her colleagues used two dogs as experimental animals that they had noticed during the canine research project “Family Dog”: Border collie “Whiskey” and the Yorkshire Terrier lady “Vicky Nina” already had them through their playful interaction with their owners Learned the meaning of some words.
“We wanted to know the conditions under which these gifted dogs can learn new words. To test this, we exposed Whiskey and Vicky Nina to the new words under two different conditions, ”explains Fugazza. In one case, they were presented to the animals in a playful context in connection with a new object. In the other, they should learn the term through an elimination process. The dog was confronted with a setup in which seven dog toys known by name were present together with a new one. It is already known from previous studies that dogs can associate a new name with an object that is unfamiliar to them.
Learned quickly – but also quickly forgotten
In the tests in which the dogs played with their owners while they were pronouncing the new names of the unknown toy, it was found that the animals memorized the terms after hearing them only four times. Once they learned the names this way, Whiskey and Vicky Nina could then choose the toys from other known and unfamiliar objects. “Such rapid learning seems to be similar to the way that human children acquire their vocabulary around the age of two to three,” says co-author Adam Miklósi. However, there is one limitation in the case of dogs, the experiments showed: dogs apparently forget what they have learned quickly. After at least an hour, Whiskey and Vicky Nina had forgotten the terms. Obviously, more training is needed for long-term imprinting.
In the second attempt, the researchers were able to confirm the ability of the dogs to use the elimination procedure again, but the four-legged friends did not succeed in learning the terms. For this task they chose the only toy that had no name when its owner mentioned a new term. But they failed when they were subsequently tested for their ability to recognize the toy by the name it heard and to distinguish it from an unknown object. The researchers were therefore unable to demonstrate rapid learning on the basis of the elimination procedure. Accordingly, social interaction is an important factor in ability.
But as the researchers point out, extremely fast learning is apparently not a general talent in dogs, as further tests with twenty dogs selected at random showed. Unlike Whiskey and Vicky Nina, they couldn’t make a connection to an object by just hearing a term four times. According to the researchers, there are two possible explanations for this: Either the special talent is based on a special disposition in individual dogs or they develop it through intensive experience with learning object names. What is true may now be the subject of further investigation, say the researchers.
Source: Eötvös Loránd University, specialist article: Scientific Reports, doi: 10.1038 / s41598-021-81699-2