Dogs are great at learning action commands like "sit” and "stay.” They're less good at remembering the names of things, like what their squeaky or stuffed toys are called.
Only an elite group of gifted word-learner dogs can retain the names of hundreds of toys. Scientists know of about 50 such pooches, but they aren’t yet sure what's behind their wordy skills.
Now, new research is pushing the limits of what the dogs can do.
Scientists already knew that these extraordinary pups could learn the names of their stuffed pizza and doughnut toys from playtime with their owners. In the latest study, they discovered that the pups can also understand new names by eavesdropping.
Ten gifted dogs - including a Border collie named Basket and a Labrador named Augie - watched their owners hold a new toy and talk to another person about it. Then the pups were told to go to another room and retrieve that specific toy from a pile of many others.
Seven out of the 10 dogs successfully learned the names of their new toy stingrays and armadillos from passively listening to their owners.
"This is the first time that we see a specific group of dogs that are able to learn labels from overhearing interactions,” said study author Shany Dror with Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and the University of Veterinary Medicine in Austria.
The pups even succeeded when the owners put the toy in an opaque box and then spoke to another person about it, creating a disconnect between seeing the object and hearing its name.
Only a few other animals, like parrots and apes, have demonstrated a knack for this kind of eavesdropping. It's also essential to human development: Children under age 2 can pick up new words from listening, including ones their parents may not have intended.
However, these special dogs are fully grown, so the brain mechanisms enabling them to eavesdrop are likely different from those of humans, Dror said.
The new work shows how "animals have a lot more going on cognitively than maybe you think they do,” said animal cognition expert Heidi Lyn with the University of South Alabama. She had no role in the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Science.
Not all dogs pick things up like this, so it's unlikely your furry friend is learning names while snacking on leftovers under the dinner table.
Dror hopes to keep studying the gifted pooches and figuring out what cues they're picking up on. They’re some of her most enthusiastic - and messy - research subjects.
"We do have dogs coming to the lab sometimes, which is really nice,” she said, "but then often someone pees on the couch. So that does happen.”
