Scour the internet and you’ll find many adorable videos of dogs who have seemingly learned to ‘talk’ to their owners, by pressing electronic buttons, preprogrammed to say certain words, called soundboards.
There’s Copper the labrador, who pushes the ‘Copper’ and ‘eat’ buttons when she wants cheese, and Bunny the poodle crossbreed, who will tap out ‘where’ and ‘Dad’ when her owner is away.
It looks impressive, but are these dogs really communicating, or are they just responding to cues from their owners?
Intrigued, Federico Rossano from the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego enlisted the help of 59 dogs who had all been trained by their owners to use these soundboards.
Working in their homes, owners and researchers randomly pressed certain buttons and then recorded whether or not the dogs responded appropriately. Were they more likely, for example, to head to the door after hearing the word ‘outside’ versus looking at their food bowl or having a scratch.
The answer, for certain words at least, was ‘yes’. Dogs were more likely to show play related behaviours in response to the word ‘play’ and look to the door when they heard ‘outside’.
Critically, these responses held true, regardless of whether it was their owner or a researcher who pressed the button, and also whether their owner pressed the button or said the word themselves.
This, says Rossano, is evidence that the dogs are not reading their owner’s body language, and are instead really processing the words.
Case closed? Not so fast. While the study shows that dogs recognise and respond to verbal cues (which we already knew), critics argue that this doesn’t tell us what the words mean to the dogs.
So, when Bunny asks, ‘Where Dad?’ and her owner responds, “He’s on a climbing trip right now,” what is she really thinking? For now, only Bunny knows.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Hattie Kingston, Bristol) 'Do dogs really understand the words used on soundboard buttons?'
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