http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/11/MNGTL73SSM28.DTL
Smart dog does more than just sit and fetch
Rico has scientists asking if canines can reason like tots
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Friday, June 11, 2004
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A border collie named Rico has scientists excited about the possibility of solving a long-standing puzzle: Do dogs learn language the way humans do?
The German house dog has astonished researchers by acquiring a remarkable "vocabulary" of at least 200 words and by demonstrating he is capable of a kind of reasoning -- almost like human toddlers -- that lets him quickly figure out the names of objects he's never seen before.
His performance has left scientists wondering whether Rico -- a natural- born herder -- is just unusually smart, or whether he is displaying something more: an insightful kind of learning ability that evolution has unexpectedly shared with mammals other than humans.
The dog's German owners have taught their 9-year-old pet to recognize a large collection of children's toys, balls and stuffed animals. He knows to select and fetch any one of the 200 when his hidden owner's voice merely calls out the name of the object.
To the surprise of the scientists studying his responses, Rico can even pick out a toy he's never seen when one of his owners scatters it randomly among 10 other toys whose names the dog already knows, but then calls the unfamiliar object by its name, which Rico has never heard.
To psychologists who study the learning processes of infants and young children, Rico's ability to understand the name of an unfamiliar object among a cluster of familiar ones whose names he already knows is called "exclusionary learning."
Learning the name of the new object instantly in only a single try, and then selecting it by name repetitively, is known as "fast mapping." Children can do it almost from infancy, but there's never been clear evidence that animals can do it, the German researchers say.
The scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, led by psychologist Julia Fischer, are reporting on Rico's achievements today in the journal Science.
They say their experiments with the dog and its unnamed owner provide the first clear evidence of humanlike "fast mapping" in an animal and report that Rico can even recall the names of the new and unfamiliar objects he's learned for as long as a month.
In a telephone interview with The Chronicle, Fisher said that within 24 hours after word about her team's experiments leaked out this week, she and her colleagues were flooded with e-mail from dog owners all over Europe saying their pets, too, were at least as smart as Rico.
"Maybe Rico's just a very smart dog and very well motivated," Fischer conceded, "but our experiments do give us some insights into how we all share learning abilities with animals and young children.
"Rico is clearly capable of independent thinking and using simple logic. Of course a child has a much richer and broader understanding of words than a dog or any other animal. But with all the other claims we're receiving from other owners, we'll have the chance for much more research into this question."
Paul Bloom, a Yale University psychologist who studies how young children learn the meanings of words, commented on the Fischer team's work in a separate article published in Science. Rico's abilities "might signal the emergence of a vibrant area of comparative cognition research," he said. "For psychologists, dogs may be the new chimpanzees."
But he also has reservations about the German research. Children learn new words in many ways, while Rico learns only through rewards when he fetches an object successfully, he noted. "If any child learned words the way Rico did, the parents would run screaming to the nearest neurologist."
At Stanford, linguistics professor Eve Clark, an expert on how children acquire language, also had reservations.
"This report is on only a single animal," Clark said. "So if Rico is in fact capable of fast mapping and exclusionary learning, is that true of just one collie, or does it mean that it's true of others as well?"
Harvard psychologist Susan Carey, whose Laboratory for Developmental Studies investigates how infants and young children reason about the world around them and learn words for new objects, said the research with Rico is both significant and scientifically important. "The evidence that it can exhibit what we call 'exclusionary learning' and 'fast mapping' is the most spectacular finding in the report," Cary said in an interview Thursday. "That any dog can do it at all is really, really surprising, even though merely associating words and objects has long been known among other researchers studying animals as varied as apes, seals, dolphins and parrots. "I'm convinced that this dog has the abilities claimed for it, but is it really understanding true communication beyond merely learning to obey commands?" Carey questioned. "Dogs are adapted by evolution and breeding to communicate with humans, but is this one actually communicating with reason and really learning language the way human children do? We need to know a lot more to answer that question."
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Smart dog does more than just sit and fetch
Rico has scientists asking if canines can reason like tots
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
[font=geneva,arial,sans-serif]
A border collie named Rico has scientists excited about the possibility of solving a long-standing puzzle: Do dogs learn language the way humans do?
The German house dog has astonished researchers by acquiring a remarkable "vocabulary" of at least 200 words and by demonstrating he is capable of a kind of reasoning -- almost like human toddlers -- that lets him quickly figure out the names of objects he's never seen before.
His performance has left scientists wondering whether Rico -- a natural- born herder -- is just unusually smart, or whether he is displaying something more: an insightful kind of learning ability that evolution has unexpectedly shared with mammals other than humans.
The dog's German owners have taught their 9-year-old pet to recognize a large collection of children's toys, balls and stuffed animals. He knows to select and fetch any one of the 200 when his hidden owner's voice merely calls out the name of the object.
To the surprise of the scientists studying his responses, Rico can even pick out a toy he's never seen when one of his owners scatters it randomly among 10 other toys whose names the dog already knows, but then calls the unfamiliar object by its name, which Rico has never heard.
To psychologists who study the learning processes of infants and young children, Rico's ability to understand the name of an unfamiliar object among a cluster of familiar ones whose names he already knows is called "exclusionary learning."
Learning the name of the new object instantly in only a single try, and then selecting it by name repetitively, is known as "fast mapping." Children can do it almost from infancy, but there's never been clear evidence that animals can do it, the German researchers say.
The scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, led by psychologist Julia Fischer, are reporting on Rico's achievements today in the journal Science.
They say their experiments with the dog and its unnamed owner provide the first clear evidence of humanlike "fast mapping" in an animal and report that Rico can even recall the names of the new and unfamiliar objects he's learned for as long as a month.
In a telephone interview with The Chronicle, Fisher said that within 24 hours after word about her team's experiments leaked out this week, she and her colleagues were flooded with e-mail from dog owners all over Europe saying their pets, too, were at least as smart as Rico.
"Maybe Rico's just a very smart dog and very well motivated," Fischer conceded, "but our experiments do give us some insights into how we all share learning abilities with animals and young children.
"Rico is clearly capable of independent thinking and using simple logic. Of course a child has a much richer and broader understanding of words than a dog or any other animal. But with all the other claims we're receiving from other owners, we'll have the chance for much more research into this question."
Paul Bloom, a Yale University psychologist who studies how young children learn the meanings of words, commented on the Fischer team's work in a separate article published in Science. Rico's abilities "might signal the emergence of a vibrant area of comparative cognition research," he said. "For psychologists, dogs may be the new chimpanzees."
But he also has reservations about the German research. Children learn new words in many ways, while Rico learns only through rewards when he fetches an object successfully, he noted. "If any child learned words the way Rico did, the parents would run screaming to the nearest neurologist."
At Stanford, linguistics professor Eve Clark, an expert on how children acquire language, also had reservations.
"This report is on only a single animal," Clark said. "So if Rico is in fact capable of fast mapping and exclusionary learning, is that true of just one collie, or does it mean that it's true of others as well?"
Harvard psychologist Susan Carey, whose Laboratory for Developmental Studies investigates how infants and young children reason about the world around them and learn words for new objects, said the research with Rico is both significant and scientifically important. "The evidence that it can exhibit what we call 'exclusionary learning' and 'fast mapping' is the most spectacular finding in the report," Cary said in an interview Thursday. "That any dog can do it at all is really, really surprising, even though merely associating words and objects has long been known among other researchers studying animals as varied as apes, seals, dolphins and parrots. "I'm convinced that this dog has the abilities claimed for it, but is it really understanding true communication beyond merely learning to obey commands?" Carey questioned. "Dogs are adapted by evolution and breeding to communicate with humans, but is this one actually communicating with reason and really learning language the way human children do? We need to know a lot more to answer that question."
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