A new study has revealed that humans and dogs can communicate through devices with buttons that are programmed to produce simple words.
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One of the first dogs to go viral on social media for learning to communicate with her owner using this method was Bunny. The dog gained over 1.5 million followers after her owner filmed her forming complex sentences with a button device.
However, a debate quickly arose about whether Bunny was truly communicating or just repeating what she had learned during training and adapting to press specific buttons around her humans’ reactions.
With this in mind, Federico Rossano from the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues decided to put this to the test.
Writing in the scientific journal Plos One, the researchers reported on a new study involving two experiments with a total of 59 dogs, all trained to use a button device.
In the first experiment, a researcher covered the buttons on a dog’s device with colored stickers that were pre-programmed for the words outside, play/toy, and hunger/eat/dinner.
Another researcher, unaware of which button was which and unable to hear the words they produced, then pressed one of these buttons, and the dog’s behavior was recorded.
The dogs’ owners involved in the study then conducted a similar experiment, but in this case, they varied between pressing one of the buttons or saying the word themselves.
The results revealed that the chances of the dogs displaying play-related behaviors were about seven times higher after the play/toy button was pressed compared to the average for the three buttons, with similar levels of appropriate behavior for the outside button.
However, the dogs showed no greater likelihood of displaying food-related behaviors when the corresponding button was pressed. Additionally, the researchers emphasized that the findings remained consistent regardless of whether a researcher or owner pressed the buttons, and whether the owner pressed a button or said the same word.
The researchers are now studying whether dogs can press the correct button for specific situations, which they say could not only help study the depth of canine word comprehension but also reveal whether such devices can truly be used for communication between humans and dogs.
Although no groundbreaking discoveries were made, the study established a foundation for future research, explained Dr. Mélissa Berthet from the University of Zurich in an interview with The Guardian.
She also highlighted that the research showed that, contrary to previous suggestions, dogs are indeed responding to the audio of the buttons rather than cues from their owners. “They really needed to show this. And now I think the scientific community is waiting for the rest, which will be exciting.”
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