Most dogs easily learn basic commands but quickly forget the names of objects. However, a new scientific study shows that there are dogs with unusual cognitive abilities that can learn and memorize words, including the names of toys spoken by their owners.
Dogs are great at learning commands like ‘sit’ and ‘stay’, but they have more difficulty remembering the names of things, with the exception of a select group of dogs with an exceptional talent for learning words, a new study reveals. . This restricted group of dogs can learn words and remember the names of hundreds of toys.
Scientists know about 50 of these dogs, but they still don’t know for sure what’s behind their abilities with words.
Scientists already knew that these extraordinary dogs could learn the names of their pizza and donut-shaped stuffed animals while playing with their owners.
In the most recent study, they discovered that dogs can also understand new names by listening to other people’s conversations.
Ten talented dogs – including a Border Collie called Basket and a Labrador called Augie – watched their owners hold a new toy and talk to someone else about it. They were then instructed to go to another room and look for that specific toy among many others.
Seven of the ten dogs successfully learned the names of their new toys just by passively listening to their owners.
“This is the first time we’ve seen a specific group of dogs able to learn names by listening to interactions”said study author Shany Dror, from Eötvös Loránd University, in Hungary, and the University of Veterinary Medicine, in Austria.
The dogs were successful even when their owners placed the toy in an opaque box and talked about it with another person, creating a disconnect between seeing the object and hearing its name.
“Animals have many more cognitive functions than we imagine”
Only a few other animals, such as parrots and monkeys, have demonstrated this ability to listen to other people’s conversations.
This ability is also essential for human development: children under the age of 2 can learn new words by listening, including words that their parents may not have intended for them to learn.
However, these special dogs are adults, so the brain mechanisms that allow them to hear other people’s conversations are probably different from those of humans, Dror said.
The new study shows how “Animals have many more cognitive functions than we imagine”pointed out animal cognition expert Heidi Lyn, from the University of South Alabama, who did not participate in the
