From babies we learn naturally new words and associations, such as spoons and bowls are related because they serve to eat, which is considered an “advanced ability.” Now, a study has discovered that dogs can also classify objects according to their function without prior training.
In the study, published Thursday in Current Biologya team of animal behavior experts has shown that talent dogs to learn words (GWL) were able to distinguish between toys “to throw” and toys “to bring”, even when the toys in question did not share any obvious physical similarity.
In addition, they were able to remember those categorizations for long periods of time, all without prior training.
“We discovered that these dogs easily to learn words can extend object labels that have the same function or that are used in the same way,” says Claudia Fugazza, a researcher at the University Eötvös Lorendo de BudapestHungary and main author of the study.
“It is as if a person calls a traditional hammer or a stone.
Throw and bring
The tests were carried out in the natural environment of dogs, with their human owners. At first, the dogs spent some time familiar with the verbal labels of two functional objects of objects: throw and bring.
Their owners used these words with specific toys and played with them accordingly, although toys did not share any similar physical characteristic.
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After, Dogs were evaluated to see if they had learned to relate functional labels to the correct group of toys before playing with more novel toys in the two different categories, but, this time, their owners did not use the ‘throw’ and ‘bring’ labels for dogs.
They discovered that the dogs were able to extend the functional labels they had learned before the new toys based on their experience when playing with them.
In the final test, the animals showed that they could successfully apply verbal labels to toys by pulling or bringing as appropriate, even when their owners had not given them a name.
“They had never heard the name of these new toys, but they had played to bring or bring, so the dog had to choose which toy was used to play each game. This was done in a natural environment, without an exhaustive training. Only the owners played for a week with the toys. Therefore, it is a type of natural interaction,” he concludes.
Basic skills
The authors defend that the ability of dogs to relate verbal labels with objects based on their functional classifications and outside the physical characteristics of toys suggest that they form a mental representation of objects based on their experience with their functions, which they can then remember.
These findings provide information on the evolution of basic language -related skills and their relationship with other cognitive abilities, including memory, according to researchers.
However, they recognize that more research is needed to understand the scope and flexibility of dog language categorization skills.
“We have shown that dogs learn the names of objects very fast and remember them for a long time, even without rehearsing, and I think that the way they expand the names beyond the perceptual similarities gives an idea of the amplitude that these names can have for dogs,” says Fugazza.