As infants,
humans naturally learn new words and their associations — like the fact that
forks are related to bowls because both are used to consume food. In a study
published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on September 18, a team of animal behavior experts demonstrate
that dogs can categorize objects by function, too. In a series of playful
interactions with their owners, a group of Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs were
able to distinguish between toys used for tugging versus fetching, even when
the toys in question didn’t share any obvious physical similarities — and then
could remember those categorizations for long periods of time, all with no
prior training.
“We discovered that these Gifted Word
Learner dogs can extend labels to items that have the same function or that are
used in the same way,” says author Claudia Fugazza of Eötvös Loránd University,
Budapest, Hungary. It’s like a person calling both a traditional hammer and a
rock by the same name, says Fugazza.
“The rock and the hammer look physically
different, but they can be used for the same function,” she says. “So now it
turns out that these dogs can do the same.”
The studies took place in the dogs’
natural home environments with their human owners. At the beginning, the dogs
spent time getting familiar with verbal labels for two functional groups of
objects: pull and fetch. Their owners used these words with specific toys and
played with them accordingly even though the toys didn’t share any similar
physical features.
Next, the dogs were tested to see if
they had learned to connect the functional labels to the correct group of toys
before playing with more novel toys in the two distinct categories. However,
this time, their owners didn’t use the “pull” and “fetch” labels for the dogs.
The team found that the dogs were able
to extend the functional labels they’d learned previously to the new toys based
on their experience playing with them. In the final test, the dogs showed that
they could successfully apply the verbal labels to the toys by either pulling
or fetching accordingly, even when their owners hadn’t named them.
“For these new toys, they’ve never heard
the name, but they have played either pull or fetch, and so the dog has to
choose which toy was used to play which game,” Fugazza says. “This was done in
a natural setup, with no extensive training. It’s just owners playing for a
week with the toys. So, it’s a natural type of interaction.”
The authors note that the dogs’ ability
to connect verbal labels to objects based on their functional classifications
and apart from the toys’ physical attributes suggests that they form a mental
representation of the objects based on their experience with their functions,
which they can later recall. These findings provide insight into the evolution
of basic skills related to language and their relationship to other cognitive
abilities, including memory, the researchers say.
More research is needed to understand
the scope and flexibility of dogs’ language categorization abilities. The
researchers suggest future studies to explore whether dogs that don’t learn
object labels may nevertheless have an ability to classify objects based on
their functions.
Source: https://sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/09/250923021212.htm
Source: Dogs can tell how toys work without any training – Scents of Science
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