She just might be the smartest pooch ever.
A border collie has learned more than 1,000 words, showing US researchers that her memory is not only better than theirs, but that she understands quite a bit about how language works.
Chaser learned the names for 1,022 toys, so many that her human handlers had to write on them in marker so that they wouldn’t forget, said study co-author Alliston Reid, a psychology professor at Wofford College in South Carolina.
PHOTO: AFP
With that repertoire, Chaser has far outpaced another dog, Rico, found by German researchers to be able to grasp about 200 words, according to a study published in 2004 in the journal Science.
As a border collie, Chaser comes from a breed of herding dog known for its intelligence, energy and strong work ethic.
Reid said she might be able to learn even more words, but her keepers stopped at 1,022 after three years of training simply because of time constraints.
However, identifying objects by name was just the beginning of the research, conducted by a pair of US psychology professors who became curious about the upper limits of a dog’s learning abilities after seeing the German study.
Study co-author John Pilley was also a master animal trainer and just happened to be getting a young border collie as a pet at about the same time as the research on Rico came out.
By the time the pup was five months old, language training began in earnest.
“John Pilley and I would go to second-hand stores and just buy huge numbers of stuffed animals and balls and children’s toys and so forth,” Reid said. “And we would give each one a name and write down the name on each item in permanent marker so that we could remember what the name of it was and use it systematically with Chaser.”
Over the course of three years, in sessions of four to five hours per day, Pilley and other trainers found that Chaser could identify every stuffed animal, frisbee and ball out of a colorful and growing pile of fun doggie toys.
She could also differentiate toys by categories, such as her 116 balls, and she could perform specific commands with select playthings, such as touching her paw to a certain ball, or fetching a particular frisbee.
And they trained her to do all this without offering any tasty treats.
“Chaser really, really likes playing with her toys and the social interaction of one of us taking one of her toys and throwing it up in the air and having her catch it,” Reid said. “It is much more rewarding for her than a morsel of food.”
The study, which appeared this week in the journal Behavioural Processes, published by the Amsterdam-based company Elsevier, shows Chaser has abilities that were left in doubt by the earlier work with Rico, such as the ability to discern commands from nouns and how to identify toys versus non-toys.
“Her learning and retention of more than 1,000 proper nouns revealed clear evidence of several capacities necessary for learning receptive human language: The ability to discriminate many nouns phonetically, the ability to discriminate many objects visually, a sizable vocabulary, and a sufficient memory system,” it said. “Chaser understood that names refer to particular objects, independent of the activity requested involving that object. Thus, [the] concern that Rico may not have understood the difference between ‘sock’ and ‘fetch-the-sock’ is ruled out in this study.”
Meanwhile, Reid said that he and Pilley are continuing to study Chaser, who is now six-and-a-half years old.
“We would like to know for example, does she really understand syntax, the order of words in a sentence? One experiment has to do with if we asked Chaser to pick up one object and place it on top of another object, will she always get that correct?” Reid said.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS