Animals Highly talented dogs memorize vocabulary for years
Highly talented dogs memorize the names of their toys for years. In just one week, the dogs were able to learn the names of up to 12 new toys.
04.09.2024, 01:01
SDA
"Although humans are probably the only species capable of language, we are not the only ones who memorize words," explained study leader Shany Dror. Her scientific study on the vocabulary memorization ability of four-legged friends has been published in the British Royal Society's journal "Biology Letters".
In 2020, Dror and her colleagues set six owners of talented Border Collies around the world the challenge of teaching them the names of a dozen different dog toys in a short space of time. "The dogs from Norway, Spain, Brazil, the USA, the Netherlands and Hungary amazed everyone when they showed that they could learn eleven to twelve such 'foreign words' within a week," she wrote in a press release.
Dogs memorized names for two years
The researchers then asked the owners to store the toys out of reach of the four-legged friends and only came back two years later with a new task: they wanted to test whether the clever dogs had memorized the names of the toys. Some of the owners had forgotten where they had stowed the dog toys, but the dogs had not remembered their names.
The dog Nalani from the Netherlands had unfortunately died by then, but the other five canine geniuses Max, Whisky, Gaia, Rico and Squall showed excellent memory skills, explained Dror, who works at the Messerli Research Institute of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. After two years, they remembered up to three quarters of the toy names.
"It would be presumptuous to say that all dogs can do this," said Claudia Fugazza from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. After all, the study was based on individuals who "showed a particular talent for learning object words".
