Study described as ‘necessary first step’ in discovering whether dogs and humans can use push-button devices to communicate
Study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307189
The title is misleading.
Prof Clive Wynne, the director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the work, described the new study as a “nothing burger”, noting that the main finding was that dogs responded to certain verbal cues.
“There is nothing remarkable about that,” he said, adding that the team only studied responses to three familiar words – and the dogs were only successful on two of them.
Wynne said the fact that the dogs had been trained to press buttons played no role in the current study, while the research did not shed new light on what dogs understood when certain words were spoken.
So we’ll need to wait for the rest of the research to conclude anything.
I disagree. It explicitly says suggest, not shows. And the study does suggest the possibility of that, but it also notes that further studies are needed to confirm initial findings.
The study doesn’t suggest anything specific about soundboards. It only focuses on dogs’ responses to prerecorded words vs spoken commands which shouldn’t surprise anyone as there’s no new ground being covered. The only news here is that scientists are barely starting into this branch of research, which this article should’ve focused on instead of this trivial study.
I added the link to the study in the post body, since the article didn’t link to it. Again, this particular study didn’t provide any evidence that it’s possible, but they raised the possibly and backed it with non-controlled citizen data. Hence, a need for a controlled study to confirm that possibility.
Thanks for the link!
In order to determine whether dogs’ performance at word comprehension is reflected in their button pressing, carefully controlled future studies must investigate whether dogs can spontaneously produce contextually appropriate button presses in experimentally induced situations [to] establish the extent to which AIC devices can be used for two-way interspecies communication
Now that would be interesting.
I’ve seen lots of dogs do this to communicate. It’s amazing and cute. Dogs are very talkative.
On one hand: it’s a learned behavior and is not all that remarkable when we’ve been doing basically the same thing for hundreds of years with less sophisticated technology. The only thing new here is the soundboard itself.
On the other: isn’t our language also learned behavior? Dog might not have deep insights into literature, and might not even understand adjectives, but they certainly can know nouns and verbs and understand them enough to follow basic instructions.
I communicate with animals with my words and hands.
No feet?
DM for those
