Genius Dog Challenge
Genius Dog Challenge
The Genius Dog Challenge was the world's first live stream broadcasted scientific experiment, and a project within of the Family Dog Project at the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. This project is led by Ádám Miklósi, head of the ELTE biological Institute, and laudia Fugazza, two experts in dog cognition and behaviour, and is managed by Shany Dror. The research focused on the ability of dogs to comprehend human words[1][2]. The scientists searched the world for dogs extremely talented in receptive language learning. The search led to six dogs that learned multiple toy names during unplanned playful interactions with their owners. These dogs were selected to participate in the challenge and were tested on their ability to learn new names of objects in a short period.
Challenge guidelines
The challenge took place in two stages.
Stage 1:each dog-owner received 6 new dog toys. They had one week to teach their dog the names of the toys. The owners were allowed to freely interact with their dogs and teach them as they saw fit. For all of them, this included short sessions in which they were interacting with their dogs, usually playing with one toy at a time and repeating its name. The success of the dogs in learning the name of these toys was tested on the seventh day.
Stage 2: two or three weeks after Stage 1 was completed, the owners were requested to teach their dogs the names of 12 new toys in one week. Once again, the success of the dogs in learning the name of these toys was tested on the seventh day.
On both occasions, on the seventh day, the researchers conducted a controlled experiment that was broadcasted live on Facebook and YouTube, and later also available on Instagram's IGTV.
Scientific history and future
Traditionally researchers studying the evolutionary basis of human language have been focusing on animals such as dolphins[3], parrots[4], and great apes[5]. However, recently researchers have started to examine family dogs as a more representative model for human behaviour and cognition because, in contrast to the other species, for dogs, the human niche is their natural environment. Among all animals, dogs are arguably the best at communicating with humans. However, while they can easily learn the meaning of actions (commands), the number of dogs recorded in the literature that could reliably identify objects by their names is very low.
Rico, an 8-year-old male border collie from Germany was the first recorded case of a dog with an extensive vocabulary of object names. His owner reported that he knew the names of 200 objects, most of which were children’s toys.
After Rico, came Chaser. In 2011 scientists and dog lovers alike were amazed when John W. Pilley, a professor from Wofford College, published two research articles about his female border collie[6][7]. Chaser was a female border collie that learned the names of over a thousand toys (1022). She was also able to perform multiple actions on the same object. She could touch an object with her nose, her paw, or retrieve it on command. The authors argued that this showed that Chaser understood the words referred to the object’s name and not to the command of retrieving them.
Bailey, a 12 years old Yorkshire Terrier, is one of the few cases of word-knowledgeable dogs ever reported, that did not belong to a working dog breed. Like Rico, Bailey learned the names of 117 toys during play sessions with her owner, without the extensive training efforts.
In 2020, Whisky and Vicky Nina, respectively a Border collie and a Yorkshire terrier, showed that they were able to learn the names of several toys after their owners repeated the new names only 4 times. Besides, Whisky linked the object names to categories of items, rather than associating a single word to a single object, even in absence of specific training for categorization.[1]
Dogs with knowledge of object names have been suggested as a comparative model for studying the mechanisms of vocabulary acquisition in infants. However, this phenomenon has been only poorly described, with only a handful of cases documented in the scientific literature, up until 2020. The Genius Dog Challenge aimed to test the speed at which such dogs could acquire the names of new toys, as well as raise public awareness to the research, to recruit more of these uniquely gifted dogs. The social media campaign resulted in the recruitment of more dogs with a vocabulary of object names. Currently, the research conducted under the Genius Dog Challenge project aims to better understand the mechanisms involved in language comprehension in dogs and examine why some dogs appear to be uniquely gifted in this field.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Fugazza, Claudia; Miklósi, Ádám (December 2020). "Depths and limits of spontaneous categorization in a family dog". Scientific Reports. 10 (1): 3082. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-59965-6. ISSN 2045-2322. PMC 7033173 Check
|pmc=value (help). PMID 32080273 Check|pmid=value (help). - ↑ Fugazza, Claudia; Andics, Attila; Magyari, Lilla; Dror, Shany; Zempléni, András; Miklósi, Ádám (December 2021). "Rapid learning of object names in dogs". Scientific Reports. 11 (1): 2222. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-81699-2. ISSN 2045-2322. PMC 7838202 Check
|pmc=value (help). PMID 33500506 Check|pmid=value (help). - ↑ Herman, Louis M.; Forestell, Paul H. (December 1985). "Reporting presence or absence of named objects by a language-trained dolphin". Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 9 (4): 667–681. doi:10.1016/0149-7634(85)90013-2. PMID 4080284. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ PEPPERBERG, Irene M.; Pepperberg, Irene M. (2009-06-30). The Alex Studies: cognitive and communicative abilities of grey parrots. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-04199-8. Search this book on
- ↑ Burling, Robbins (2007). The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-921403-7. Search this book on
- ↑ Pilley, John W.; Reid, Alliston K. (February 2011). "Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents". Behavioural Processes. 86 (2): 184–195. doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2010.11.007. PMID 21145379. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ Pilley, John W. (November 2013). "Border collie comprehends sentences containing a prepositional object, verb, and direct object". Learning and Motivation. 44 (4): 229–240. doi:10.1016/j.lmot.2013.02.003.
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