They're pretty smart, very social, and really expressive. Does this mean that dogs can have an unrecognized ability to truly talk on to humans?
A brand new study from UC San Diego and its partner universities suggests there are more reasons than ever to explore this query.
In a paper published Wednesday within the journal PLOS ONE, researchers explain that dogs trained with soundboard buttons were capable of understand certain recorded words, equivalent to “play” and “outside,” within the context through which they were spoken. They were capable of accomplish that with none physical or verbal cues.
“The dogs responded appropriately to the word,” said Federico Rossano, a cognitive scientist at UCSD and lead creator of the study.
“This is a first step in assessing whether dogs understand what they are doing when they press these buttons,” he said.
Rossano was referring to easy and widely used soundboards, which often have round buttons with a word or symbol on them. When the buttons are pressed, a pre-recorded word is played.
In recent years, many individuals have trained their dogs to make use of soundboards, repeatedly exposing the animals to different words. In some cases, the dogs press a button after an individual asks them an issue, equivalent to, “Do you want to go outside?”
In other cases, dogs press a button without being asked, appearing to specific a conscious interest or desire.
Many people take videos of the dog's behavior and post them on YouTube, TikTok and other social media sites, where they generate enormous interest. Some videos claim or imply that dogs are essentially talking to humans once they press the sound buttons, a claim that bothers scientists who say the animals often reply to physical or verbal cues.
The study, led by UCSD, required scientific rigor.
In one other experiment, citizen scientists did the identical thing with 29 dogs in a house setting. Participants were supervised remotely by the research team.
Both experiments involved many dog breeds, from beagles and golden retrievers to poodles and terriers.
The experiments were a part of a broader effort by UCSD's Comparative Cognition Lab and other institutions world wide to raised understand how and what dogs understand and communicate. Part of the continued work involves studying every button a dog presses within the hope that it would reveal something useful, particularly in regards to the animal's health.
“We see dogs using buttons in ways that suggest they are angry, happy, frustrated or excited,” said Rossano, who appears in “Inside the Mind of a Dog,” a documentary Now Play on Netflix.
“I hope to learn not only something about their psychology, but also something that will benefit the animals,” he said.
Originally published:
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