Titel (eng)

How do soundboard-trained dogs respond to human button presses? An investigation into word comprehension

Autor*in

Amalia P. M. Bastos   University of California, San Diego / Johns Hopkins University

Federico Rossano   University of California, San Diego

Hairou Hou   University of California, San Diego

Cassandra Paul   University of California, San Diego

Sarita Raghunath   University of California, San Diego

Jack Terwilliger   University of California, San Diego

Lisa Korpos   University of California, San Diego

Alexandria Cairo-Evans   University of California, San Diego

Gabriella E. Smith   University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna / University of St Andrews

Lucas Naranjo   FluentPet / Universitat de València

Zachary N. Houghton   University of California, Davis

Ashley Evenson   Canisius College / FluentPet

Patrick M. Wood   University of California, San Diego / Johns Hopkins University

Verlag

Public Library of Science

Beschreibung (eng)

Past research on interspecies communication has shown that animals can be trained to use Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) devices, such as soundboards, to make simple requests of their caretakers. The recent uptake in AIC devices by hundreds of pet owners around the world offers a novel opportunity to investigate whether AIC is possible with owner-trained family dogs. To answer this question, we carried out two studies to test pet dogs' ability to recognise and respond appropriately to food-related, play-related, and outside-related words on their soundboards. One study was conducted by researchers, and the other by citizen scientists who followed the same procedure. Further, we investigated whether these behaviours depended on the identity of the person presenting the word (unfamiliar person or dog's owner) and the mode of its presentation (spoken or produced by a pressed button). We find that dogs produced contextually appropriate behaviours for both play-related and outside-related words regardless of the identity of the person producing them and the mode in which they were produced. Therefore, pet dogs can be successfully taught by their owners to associate words recorded onto soundboard buttons to their outcomes in the real world, and they respond appropriately to these words even when they are presented in the absence of any other cues, such as the owner's body language.

Sprache des Objekts

Englisch

Datum

2024

Rechte

Dieses Werk bzw. dieser Inhalt steht unter einer
CC BY 4.0 - Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International Lizenz.

CC BY 4.0 International

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Klassifikation

Animals; Dogs; Humans; Comprehension; Female; Male

Mitglied in der/den Collection(s) (1)