"Could My Dog Do That Too?"...Smart Dogs Learn by Eavesdropping on Their Owners

[Financial News] Some highly trainable dogs can eavesdrop on human conversations and learn words for new objects, according to a new study.
On the 9th (local time), The Associated Press (AP) and other outlets reported that cognitive researcher Shany Dror of the Clever Dog Lab at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna in Austria, together with a team from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, confirmed that so‐called "genius dogs," formally known as Gifted Word Learners, can pick up new words by listening in on people talking.
Dror, who has run the Genius Dog Challenge for several years to recruit dogs that show exceptional ability to learn language through social interaction, noticed during her research that some dogs seemed to be eavesdropping on their guardians’ conversations.
“For example, we were talking about ordering pizza, and the dog walked into the living room carrying the toy named ‘pizza,’” Dror said.
This led the research team to test whether dogs could figure out the link between a new word and a new object without being taught directly by their guardians.
The researchers conducted experiments with 10 genius dogs, including Ogi, a Retriever, and Basket, a Border Collie, under two different conditions.
In the first condition, the owner showed the dog a toy and repeatedly said its name, directly teaching the word.
In the second condition, the dog simply watched as its owner held a new toy and talked about it with another person, and was then instructed to fetch the new toy from a pile of toys.
As a result, 7 out of the 10 dogs correctly retrieved the toy after eavesdropping on their owner’s conversation. Even when the toy was placed inside an opaque box so it could not be seen, and the dogs only heard a conversation describing the toy’s appearance, they were still able to identify the correct toy.
“These findings provide clues for examining whether there are complex mechanisms that enable social learning even in animals without language,” Dror said. “They suggest that, before humans developed language, there already existed very sophisticated cognitive abilities that allowed learning from others.”
She added, “It is unlikely that typical dogs learn new words just by overhearing them,” but noted that “dogs in general are extremely good at understanding human communicative signals.”
Animal cognition expert Heidi Lyn also commented, “This study shows that animals are engaging in far more cognitive activity than we tend to assume.” She added, “Not every dog learns this way, so in everyday life it is unlikely that a pet dog will learn its name just by snatching leftovers from under the dining table.”
newssu@fnnews.com Kim Soo-yeon Reporter