

Dog learns over 1,000 words - dangoldin
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/science/18dog.html

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Vivtek
I call shenanigans. The researcher wrote the name of each toy onto it with a
Sharpie - clearly the dog simply read the name off instead of memorizing all
1000 items.

There's just so much sloppy research out there.

~~~
JshWright
I think it's funny that the dog's recall outpaced the researcher...

The article mentions the fact that humans can use context to help remember
words, but the dog has to use rote repetition. It's interesting that the
reliance on context that helps us learn stuff in general could mean that dogs
may actually be "better" at building a vocabulary of 1000+ unrelated names.

~~~
mhb
It doesn't sound like the researcher had any trouble remembering the words.
Just remembering which ones he had taught to the dog.

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jeremymims
We humans define intelligence in such limited terms.

I have a border collie who's remarkably intelligent. But the words she knows
are just the beginning. She's incredibly perceptive. Gestures, facial
expressions, and vocal tone are all things she pays attention to.

Determining how intelligent an animal is by how much it can learn the words of
our language is a remarkably arrogant thing. We've clearly underestimated the
intelligence of every animal we've ever dealt with. We only ever revise our
estimates of animal intelligence upwards.

~~~
jordan0day
"We humans define intelligence in such limited terms." How would you define
intelligence, then? Being able to correctly respond to human emotional cues
has been evolutionally advantageous for dogs. They've had thousands of years
of coexistence to refine their instinctual abilities to "interpret" our
emotions, which leads to more attachment on our part, which leads to better
reproductive opportunities for those dogs which we are more attached to. For
all we know, dogs responses to human emotions, gestures, and nonverbal cues
are a completely autonomic behavior.

I love dogs, I think my dog is super-smart, funny, and very sweet. I've heard
her particular breed referred to as "the dog with the human brain" on some dog
TV show before, and I'm sure she's not even as smart as a collie. That said, I
can't help but feel like your comment is a bit... overwrought. Dogs clearly
understand parts of human language and judging them by their ability to
understand it seems like the _best_ way to determine their intelligence. I
would hardly call it "remarkably arrogant". You have to consider the fact that
humans have likely had spoken language for as long as we've had domesticated
canines.

In the end I can't help but feel like over-sentimental and hyperbolic (would
you say we've "underestimated the intelligence" of, say, jellyfish?)
declarations like yours really set us up only for disappointment. Our dogs are
great, and probably do actually _love_ us, but they're not furry little
geniuses held back only by their lack of proper speaking ability.

All that said, they're still _way better_ than cats.

~~~
jeremymims
This is precisely why I believe almost all of these experiments are flawed.

You begin with the assumption (based on nothing other than a general feeling
of human specialness) that "For all we know, dogs responses to human emotions,
gestures, and nonverbal cues are a completely autonomic behavior". Considering
that we discover all kinds of animals are smarter than we thought with each
passing experiment, the burden of proof should lie with you. The limitations
appear to be our experiments.

We do not start with this assumption when dealing with human beings. The safe
assumption is that animals have their own desires, goals, ambitions, and
purposes for existence. Since we have significant trouble understanding them
or communicating with them (even though we know that within their own species
they communicate perfectly well with each other), we might start from a less
biased viewpoint.

As for jellyfish, I don't know. But I do know that we've approached it from
the wrong angle. Asking how many words a jellyfish can respond to and then
determining whether or not it is intelligent is a surefire way to create a
lousy experiment.

BTW, Europeans used to do the same sorts of experiments with people from other
countries and civilizations. They knew that white Anglo Saxons were the best
and brightest so they looked for evidence to prove it. Africans clearly hadn't
invented guns or the printing press so they determined that they had a lower
level of intelligence. It's just as ridiculous a methodology when you're
talking about studying animals.

~~~
tzs
Considering that if you take very young wolves and raise them as if they were
dogs they fail to acquire anywhere near the understanding of human emotions,
gestures, and non-verbal clues that dogs acquire, it seems pretty clear that
there is something built-in to dogs at play here.

Keep in mind that humans have lived in a very close, symbiotic relation with
dogs for a very long time. It's at least 20k years, with some indications the
relationship could go back 100k years.

It may have even been the advantage dogs gave us that let us win out over
rivals such as neanderthals.

~~~
rahoulb
I'm not at my computer so can't find the reference but there has been an
ongoing experiment in Russia where they selectively bred Siberian foxes and
after about 20 generations had a female that responded to her name and craved
human attention. All her puppies (is that the right word for a fox?) exhibited
the same behaviour and became more and more dog-like.

Edit: typos

~~~
Anchor
The article and related discussion five months back
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1557209>

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joshu
We have a little yorkie mix is shockingly bright. We haven't taught her as
many things (do you HAVE a thousand different things you want your dog
touching?) but she picks things up quickly.

She'll do practically anything for cheese. It took about a whole slice of
american cheese to teach her to ring a bell on command; then we tied it to the
door. We put her leash on and made her ring the bell to open the door - she
figured it out in exactly one try.

When we show her a new thing and get some food out, she KNOWS she is going to
learn something new. She'll quickly poke it, shove it, pick it up, look at
you, and repeat. Just in case that's what we wanted her to do...

Dogs are amazing.

(Obligatory picture: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshu/4557297986> )

~~~
mirkules
Heh, I have a morkie (maltese + yorkie). He goes nuts for toys, so one day I
got one of those zip-toys, where you pull a cord and it vibrates. He was
beside himself -- but then I made him just watch me pull the cord a few times,
and when he took it, he knew exactly what to do. He would put it between his
paws and pull the cord with his teeth. That blew me away.

By the way, I didn't know this before, but dogs can be rewarded with toys
instead of treats - I taught him a few other tricks this way.

~~~
joshu
I demand pictures.

Ours mostly is food-driven. She'll fetch if there's food involved, but not
otherwise.

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iaskwhy
I always thought people underestimated animals communication skills because
for me it would make sense for animals to have their own vocabulary in
whatever is their language which we just don't happen to understand yet. There
have been some great studies on this matter over the years, my favorite being
one done with monkeys in which scientists recorded their sounds when presented
with different types of fruit but always the same sound for the same fruit.

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doorty
This reminds me of Betsy who was a border collie on the cover of national
geographic a couple years ago. Betsy could identify 300 objects and could even
associate new physical objects with a photograph of the object. I have a
border collie and they are generally regarded as the most intelligent of
breeds. However, if you don't invest the time to work with a border collie,
they will have no problem working destroying your house ;)

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WalterBright
I'd love to see what happens when dogs are bred for intelligence, rather than
those other silly things people breed them for.

~~~
philwelch
I think some breeds are, at least in terms of practical working intelligence.
Though most of that might come down to temperament and obedience--is a beagle
really _stupider_ than a German Shepherd Dog because you can't teach him to
sniff for drugs, or is he just too ADHD to care?

~~~
gigamonkey
Uh, they use beagles for sniffing for all kinds of things: drugs, bombs, even
termites.

That said, German Shepherds are an interesting case because, as I understand
it, their breed standard is actually a behavioral standard: they have to be
able to perform a certain level of obedience, tracking, and bite work (think
big leather gloves) to get papers.

~~~
robin_reala
People used to train pigs to hunt truffles, but more recently beagles have
been the go-to animal as they tend not to eat the prized catch.

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nhangen
Would've been nice to see a video to go with the article.

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lotusleaf1987
One of my friends in college taught his dog to bring him random different
objects like a lighter, backpack, pencil, tv remote, etc etc. He taught it to
skateboard and when he'd make a gun with his hand and point it at the dog it
would freeze, then if he "pulled the trigger" with his thumb the dog would
fall over and play dead. There were a bunch of other tricks it could do like
'kickflip' were the dog would spin itself. I really do think dogs are smarter
than people give them credit for.

~~~
electromagnetic
I got my dog about 5 months ago from the SPCA. She's now a year old (plus a
month), we got her at 8 months. She was picked up as a stray and I'm unsure
how long she had been in her original home to begin with. She went poop
outside, but she had bad problems with submissive and excited peeing that it's
hard to tell if she was ever fully trained to bathroom outside. What I do know
is that when we got her she barely understood sit (only with food in my hand,
so I'm half betting this was a natural reaction than actual training), and
that was the extent of her tricks.

With only reinforcement of her existing behaviours we've got her to learn:
sit, spin, lay, roll (over), pretty (where they sit with their ass on the
floor but upright with her front paws off the floor, my mother-in-law's dog
helped greatly with teaching by example), tall (where she stands by herself on
her back legs) dance (she'll do a 360 while on her back legs) and speak. [Ed:
I forgot, we taught her to 'stand', IE move from lay down to sit, or sit to on
all fours, because she'd continuously lay when told to sit.] These are all
performed easily with verbal command only.

So far we've only trained using single syllable words (dogs don't understand
the actual words, their brains are merely receiving a signal and performing an
associated action) to keep the input the same. My wife is Canadian and I'm
British, so how we pronounce things can be very different sometimes, but a
syllable is nearly universal in the Anglosphere... basically we're making our
dog multi-region compatible as just in the people she meets there's easily 4
or more dialects that can be giving her commands.

Potential tricks we can teach based off her existing behaviour are: Play dead,
jump, growl and as she's got hound in her I'm hoping to one day get a howl
command trained. We've noticed hints of 'paw'. She already knows fetch with a
thrown object, so it would only be a matter of association training to get her
to actually bring things (although for my in-laws their dog just brought the
paper when my father-in-law jokingly told the dog to bring it without it being
previously trained and their dog was picked up at 8-weeks so I doubt it had
previously been trained).

My dog is a Dachshund and Jack Russell Terrier cross and certainly isn't the
easiest dog to train, but simple operant conditioning is working great. By
making her wait before she's allowed to eat she's actually stopped scavenging
when we take her for walks (try ripping a piece of KFC out of a dogs throat,
she never bit at me but it's damn hard trying to pry a dogs jaws open _and_
stick fingers down its mouth to stop it choking on a piece of meat with bone
in it), she's also stopped stealing food off of the coffee table (she got in
from her walk one day and stole a large day old pizza crust off the table and
had eaten 4/5ths of it before I finally managed to catch her).

By the best estimates, I have another 14 years with this dog and so far I've
mostly been working at removing bad behaviours she had learnt. For all the
time I taught tricks, I spent easily twice as long making bad behaviours go
extinct. I don't intend to stop training my dog because the more time I spend
training her, the more relaxed she is at home (Jack Russell and relaxed are
commonly considered antonyms).

I'll have to record it sometime, but the thing I don't think people understand
about dogs is that they're consciously trying to comprehend you. When teaching
her to sit pretty by verbal command only she would hit this point where she
hits the 'zone' her eyes become locked and you can see the gears crunching and
then she performed the trick with no signalling. She also tried brute-forcing
her tricks; literally she'll perform every trick she's learnt and then give up
and start doing 'speak' to every command. You go back 5 minutes later and
she'll hit the 'zone'.

~~~
gnaritas
> dogs don't understand the actual words, their brains are merely receiving a
> signal and performing an associated action

And that differs from understanding exactly how?

~~~
electromagnetic
Humans have the ability to understand multiple meanings, modify the meanings
and understand the mis-meanings.

Example joke: "Ever notice how we park on driveways, drive on parkways, pay
tolls to go on freeways and it takes longer to get where you want on an
expressway." All illustrate how our usage and the meanings of our words have
been modified over time.

A driveway is a section of personal roadway that leads to a personal garage
(you would never have left one of the old 70% wooden cars outside with zero
rust proofing on the metal, ever). A parkway was supposed to be a scenic
roadway to link urban and suburban parks with pleasure roads where people
could park freely and enjoy the area, now it's commonly a synonym for any
general highway. Freeways were actually speed-limit-free highways, the 'free'
never had anything to do with cost until the very late 20th century. An
expressway was designed as a high-speed arterial road, which may have a
limited number of driveways.

~~~
gnaritas
None of that addresses the issues of whether the dog understands. Yes, humans
have a higher level of understanding in the sense that we understand
abstractions, but our greater abilities in that area don't disqualify the
dog's simpler ability from being called understanding.

If the dog can tell the difference between being told to fetch the paper vs
fetch my shoes, then he understands.

Beyond that, the statement...

> their brains are merely receiving a signal and performing an associated
> action

Equally applies to humans; our brains just have a more complex form of
association. There is no inherent meaning to any of the noises we make that we
call words other than they're associated to something. Your associations to
those noises is far more complex than the dogs, but you can't call yours
_understanding_ and not his; his understanding is simpler, but if he performs
the correct trick, then he understands the word in the same sense you do, he
associated some kind of meaning to that word, just like you do.

~~~
electromagnetic
That's fair to say. Any comprehension is understanding even if it is just rote
learning of single words to commands.

You're right, just because the dog doesn't understand 50+ words for 'drink'
(water, coke, pepsi, coffee, tea, etc etc.) doesn't mean it isn't
understanding in the same comprehension as if you got a 3 year old to bring
you a 'drink'.

I don't know what I was thinking, I must have been in a state of sleep
deprived idiocy. The simple fact you can teach a dog in human linguistics to
sit when you say 'sit' signifies its understanding. You wouldn't get this
response in an animal that all its communication skills are genetically
encoded.

I remember reading about how Native Americans used to hunt Wolves with pitfall
traps and how wolves would teach their young how to avoid the traps, like they
would hunt a deer, they can also do the same with poisoned meats. These
clearly show wolves are capable of understanding abstract concepts. Unless
sink holes are a natural predator of wolves I doubt there's a genetic cue for
"you see that flat piece of ground, you'll fall through that into a big pit"
or "you see that steak, that's poisoned, but the one sat on the side of that
metal contraption in their yard isn't!"

I was thinking of understanding along the lines that we can understand
multiple meanings and abstract ideas. However, 1:1 learning is still
understanding, and clearly Canis Lupis is capable of learning abstract ideas
so a dog certainly has the ability to (even if we have to rebreed it into the
species).

~~~
gnaritas
What's funny, is you're the guy with the dog; I have no pets. You should have
been the one convincing me that your dog _understands_. Anyway, and up-vote
for you.

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VladRussian
wonderful article. It does take intelligence to recognize another
intelligence.

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hugh3
How does he smell?

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KleinmanB
WOOFord College!

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JoelMcCracken
Fortunately, we have ten fingers. Otherwise, this wouldn't even make the news!

