Dogs are even better at learning the names of new toys than previously thought. They pick up a new word when their owner mentions it and shows it in a conversation with another person, without anyone paying attention to the dog. In their research report published this week in Science is published, dog researchers led by Shany Dror (Veterinary Medicine University of Vienna) are so enthusiastic about these achievements that they compare it with the achievements of human children of one and a half years old who also learn new words pick up by listening to conversations.
The experiments were done with dogs that were already known to be excellent word learners, the vast majority of which were border collies. But when they turned out to score excellently, the ‘eavesdropping’ test was also done with ‘normal’ dogs. They scored much worse, as would be expected, but still well above chance.
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Dogs have been humans’ faithful companions for at least 15,000 years. In recent decades, research has made it increasingly clear that this domesticated wolf has adapted extensively to human social life. And now it turns out that he can also eavesdrop on ‘conversations’, just as human children do all the time. The design of the new experiment is essentially the same with which the border collie Rico surprised animal psychologists more than twenty years ago when it turned out that he had learned more than two hundred different object names from his owner. For example, that owner said: ‘get the WDR Maus!’ (a doll from a children’s program on German TV) and then Rico went to the other room full of toys and fished the right one out of the pile. And if you gave Rico a completely new word, he would still run to the other room and fish out the only new object that was in the pile. And he remembered new words for at least four weeks. Even then Rico’s learning ability was compared to that of human children. Many new experiments followed.
The crucial test in the new study, with the bugged object name, consisted of a simple change to the old model. Instead of the owner telling their smart dog the name of that fun new toy, he or she sits down at the table (or sometimes on the floor) with a friend or family member. The dog is kept at a distance in a crate or by a child gate. Then the owner takes out the new toy and starts an enthusiastic conversation with the other person that lasts a minute. It goes like this, for example: “Look, this is the krikri” and “do you also want the krikri?”, after which the (silent) other person also takes the toy in his hand. Nobody looks at the dog. After a short waiting period, the dog is asked to retrieve the new toy from a pile in another room (which had been placed there, along with a completely new play object as a control). “Get the krikri!” Of the ten dogs subjected to this test, Labrador Augie, border collies Basket and Shira and Australian shepherd (blue heeler cross) Gadget even scored zero errors. The others also did well, except border collie Gaia. It only scored 40 percent.
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