A recent study published in PLOS ONE dispels the notion that dogs are only mimicking their handlers by pressing soundboard buttons. But now a groundbreaking study, led by a team of world renowned scientists, has revealed the domesticated pooches can understand not only their master’s words but also the tone of human speech and they don’t even need any training to do it another way doggies are just like humans.
Decoding Canine Communication
As the latest in animal social tech continues to sweep the pet world: soundboard buttons. The buttons which essentially play pre-recorded words when manipulated (allegedly giving a dog the ability to “speak”) have only stoked more talk about what dogs may actually be communicating with their speech.
By now, you might have heard of a PLOS One study (new window) which was led by Federico Rossano was an associate professor at the University of California San Diego showing empirical evidence that dogs trained to use buttons on soundboards do appear to understand specific words and are not simply picking up visual cues from their humans. We conducted two complementary experiments (one in person and other through citizen science), where the dog owners performed these trials at home under instruction.
The dogs selected the words play and outside just as they would with the owner regardless of if it was being spoken by the owner or played through button-press/audio-over-speaker; and some volume/pitch did not change how/which word(s) were selected in unfamiliar experiences as well. Most significantly, this suggests that dogs are hearing the words on their own — without support from a prompt (sit), or even just the emotional content of a phrase.
Enhancements: Improving Scientific Quality and Reliability
But in the grand scheme of things, perhaps the researchers’ approach is even more important — because they have set up serious efforts to make sure their work can be transparent and replicable down the road. The research was pre-registered, so the hypotheses, data collection procedures, variables and analysis plans were all specified beforehand in an open access paper before any data had been collected. As explained by Rossano, this is a good way to increase accountability and reduce the possibility of cherry-picking results — it has even been applauded as a step in the right direction for cognitive scientists and psychologists trying to clean up their act from more established calls to improve scientific rigour and discard bias or fraud.
This not only Christiancedrimoereases confidence in the results, but permits further research to build on these internationally important findings, and other studies that are following a similar path (none of which were contacted by Sally Curtain). This study is just the beginning, says Rossano; there is much more to explore with independent dogs using soundboard buttons — to further test our understanding of canine cognition and what we do not yet know about it.
Such interdisciplinary collaborations are essential to more broadly understanding the angels on our shoulders (see what I did there?!), and this study underscores that need a study based on this work will run in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Conclusion
Those findings are headed for a showdown with prevailing notions regarding the boundaries of actual dog-to-human communication and could alter significantly our understanding of the extent to which our pup pals might be giving us more than just puppy-dog eyes. There could be even more incredible findings as the investigation continues into how deep a bond humans can form with dogs. This is the groundbreaking study that more than 100 years of curiosity about the animal world has sustained.
