The trend of pet owners “talking” to their dogs using soundboards or buttons has taken social media by storm, with videos showing dogs seemingly understanding and responding to words. This has sparked widespread curiosity: Are our canine companions truly grasping what we are saying? To explore this intriguing possibility, scientists from the University of California (UC) San Diego and other institutions have conducted new research, delving into whether dogs can actually comprehend and respond to specific words communicated through these devices.
The study, published in PLOS ONE, aims to answer the question whether augmentative interspecies communication (AIC) devises, such as soundboards, can be used by owners to make simple requests to their pet dogs. It investigates five principal questions:
- Whether dogs can recognize and respond appropriately to the words recorded on their soundboards
- Whether they exhibit these responses even in the absence of other contextual or owner-produced cues, even when they are produced by an unfamiliar person
- Whether citizen science studies and in-person studies can produce comparable results in this population of subjects
- Whether dogs attend to speech specifically in this context, or other cues
- Whether owner-trained soundboard-using dogs tilt their heads in response to familiar words in the same way that dogs trained to recognize object names do
“This study addresses public skepticism about whether dogs truly understand what the buttons mean,” says Federico Rossano, associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, and one of the authors on the paper in a report by Science Daily. “Our findings are important because they show that words matter to dogs, and that they respond to the words themselves, not just to associated cues.”
The study found dogs were more likely to engage in play-related behaviors when a play-related word was spoken by either an experimenter or their owner and similarly more likely to show outside-related behaviors in response to an outside-related word. This suggests dogs can form associations between these words or buttons and their outcomes. However, dogs did not consistently display food-related behaviors in response to food-related words. This may be because some of the dogs were already satiated before the test, or because they did not anticipate being fed outside of their usual meal times, as the study was conducted during work hours.