Some dogs may learn in ways similar to how we, humans, did as infants! A team of animal behavior experts demonstrated that gifted dogs can apply the meaning of learned labels like “pull” and “fetch,” even to toys they had never seen before. What’s more, these brilliant pups accomplished this feat just by playing with their owners under natural environments, that is, with no prior training in captivity. This groundbreaking study was published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on September 18 by the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
“It’s like a person calling both a traditional hammer and a rock by the same name,” said study author Claudia Fugazza of Eötvös Loránd University. “The rock and the hammer look physically different, but they can be used for the same function. So now it turns out that these dogs can do the same.”
Human infants naturally learn new words and their associations — like the fact that forks are related to bowls, even though they look nothing alike, because both are used to consume food. Scientists call this mental trick “label extension,” which, in this experiment, was demonstrated by dogs too, indicating that some dogs can classify objects by function, not just appearance. In a series of playful interactions with their owners, a group of Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs—six Border Collies and one Blue Heeler—was able to distinguish between toys used for tugging versus fetching, even when the toys in question didn’t share any obvious physical similarities, and then could remember those categorizations for long periods of time, all with no prior training.
“This was done in a natural setup, with no extensive training,” said Fugazza. “It’s just owners playing for a week with the toys. So it’s a natural type of interaction.”
First, the dog owners used two verbal labels, “pull” and “fetch,” to play with their dogs using groups of toys in their natural home environments. The toys did not share any similar physical features.
Then came the challenge: the researchers tested the dogs to see if they were able to extend the meaning of the functional labels of “pull” and “fetch” to new toys that they had neither seen before nor looked anything like the ones they had already played with. To carry out this test, the owners kept silent about the correct labels associated with those toys and let the dogs figure it out. Spoiler alert: they aced it!
When asked to select a toy for fetching or pulling, the dogs got it right more often than pure chance would allow. In other words, they weren’t barking up the wrong tree.
The authors note that the dogs’ ability to connect verbal labels to objects based on their functional classifications and apart from the toys’ physical attributes suggests that they form a mental representation of the objects based on their experience with their functions, which they can later recall. These findings provide insight into the evolution of basic skills related to language and their relationship to other cognitive abilities, including memory, the researchers say.
According to researchers, the exact mental process remains a mystery. Like any other breakthrough in science, this study raises some new questions, like what the scope and flexibility of dogs’ language categorization abilities are, and whether these skills could be found in other species.
The researchers suggest future studies to explore whether dogs that don’t learn object labels may nevertheless have an ability to classify objects based on their functions.
“We have shown that dogs learn object labels really fast, and they remember them for a long period, even without rehearsing,” Fugazza says. “And I think the way they extend labels also beyond perceptual similarities gives an idea of the breadth of what these labels could be for dogs.”
