Think your dog is smart? Many pet parents do, but it turns out some dogs are practically geniuses. While a lot of pooches can recognize the name of their favorite chew toys, these brilliant ones take it one step further. According to a new study, they can group their toys by function, like tugging or fetching, and even more impressively? They can do it regardless of whether or not the playthings look alike.
Scientists call this mental trick “label extension,” and it’s something humans use when we realize things like both a mug and a glass count as “cups.” Animals can learn it, but it typically takes years of training in a strict setting. But these clever dogs were able to pick it up easily just from playing with their owners at home for a week.
- These “gifted word learner” dogs (six border collies and one blue heeler) were chosen for the study because they had already shown they could learn dozens of toy names through play.
- Owners first taught them to associate the commands “pull” and “fetch” with not just one toy, but groups of toys used for that kind of game.
- Once dogs proved they could pick the right one on command, new toys were introduced through play, but weren’t given labels.
- When asked to grab a toy for fetching or pulling, the dogs were right frequently enough that it couldn’t be purely chance.
“We have shown that dogs learn object labels really fast, and they remember them for a long period, even without rehearsing,” explains lead researcher Claudia Fugazza with Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. “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.”
Source: NY Post