Your dog may be spying on you
A new study shows that some smart dogs can learn words just by listening to human conversations
Miso, a 6-year-old male border collie from Canada, who knows the names of nearly 200 toys.
Most dog owners know that their dog is smart enough to know a few favorite phrases — for example, “walkie,” or, perhaps more likely, “dinner time.” Some particularly intelligent dogs can even identify over 100 words. And incredibly, some “talented” dogs may be able to learn words not by being taught but purely by listening to human conversations.
In a new study published In Science On Thursday, researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary found that a small group of “talented” dogs could learn the names of new toys just by listening to their owners talk about the objects. For comparison, this is the same language learning skills as an 18-month-old child.
Researchers asked dog owners to interact with someone else in their household and name two new toys in front of their pets, but without addressing the animals directly. The owners then placed the toy pair in a separate room with some others and asked their dogs to fetch a new play object. The dogs were able to choose new toys by listening to their owners, as if they were shown these toys and then asked to find the objects.
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“With some dogs, it seems like they had no doubt about what they were supposed to do,” says Shani Dror, now a postdoctoral researcher in the Clever Dog Lab at the Veterinary University of Vienna and co-author of the study. “They would just walk into the room, go straight to the toy that they knew was the new toy and (then immediately get it).
“The fact that they can listen and hear people passing an object back and forth and labeling it — and then pick up that word — means they are participating in that conversation. They’re able to parse the name of the label and correctly associate it with that item,” says Heidi Lynn, a comparative psychologist and associate professor at the University of South Alabama, who was not involved in the study. “It’s a very sophisticated attentional and cognitive leap that they’re making.”
Similar skills have also been observed in other animals, such as ape And parrotsThe new research provides evidence that some dogs can learn certain words even when they are not directly addressed by their owners, says Namira Akhtar, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study, Still, she cautions, the dogs included in the study were particularly smart, so perhaps not all dogs will be so smart,
It is not clear how such “talented” dogs actually learn or why some dogs seem so much more capable of learning new words and phrases than others.
Dror, who recently lost her 15-year-old dog, a ship dog named Mitos, says she hopes the new study will help dog owners better appreciate their canine companions’ ability to pay attention to social cues.
“I think we should all try to pay more attention to the way we interact with and around our dogs,” she says, “from the way we stand, to the way we look at them, to the way we say our words.”
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