Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 67 posts

Re: Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

#51

Post by mannykannot »

gspencley wrote: post #34
crooked-v wrote: post #2

So where are all the people who apparently think that pets can't understand basic vocabulary? It's treated like some wild revelation when it comes up in articles like this, but anyone who's ever had a dog or cat knows what the reactions are like when words like "walk" or "bath" or "tuna" get mentioned. For particularly attentive dogs you can even end up with the euphemism treadmill from "walk" to "W-A-L-K" to substit…

This speaks to an interesting question that is extremely difficult to answer: "Can pets think conceptually?" A word like "table", to a human, does not represent a concrete. It represents an abstraction, ALL tables, all things that have a flat surface and four legs. When a dog hears "table", or "walk", do they understand the abstract concept of walking, or tables in general? Or do they interpret it as a very specific,…

Here's a case in which a dog, already knowing the name of more than a hundred objects, associated a previously unknown name with a previously unknown object. I don't know if there are any controlled, replicated studies demonstrating this.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/world-smartest-dog-nova-sp...

This would not imply a facility for language understanding and resoning to anything like the extent we have, but it is the sort of preliminary step that might have opened the door for language to evolve in our ancestors.

Re: Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

#52

Post by cgriswald »

inglor_cz wrote: post #48
cgriswald wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is rather up to those making the claims to show that these stories are more than just selection bias.

How should such a study even look like? I mean, some people are perfectly fine with labeling other people NPCs.

I don't think I would want to design such a study, but at a minimum arguments would have to be made ahead of time for meaningful pairings "outside-water" == "beach", all button presses would have to be recorded, and then a statistical conclusion could be reached.

> I mean, some people are perfectly fine with labeling other people NPCs.

Indeed. So whatever such a study concludes is unlikely to change people's ideas about dogs much.

Re: Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

#53

Post by abdullahkhalids »

technothrasher wrote: post #24
not_the_fda wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people think animals are dumb beasts. My neighbor threw a party with a bunch of people in his PhD program. Our dogs hang out and we left the gate open between our properties so the dogs could go back and forth. One of the PhD students was amazed that if you threw a ball over the fence the dog knew how to go around the fence and through the gate to get the ball.

They can certainly learn things like using gates, however they don't seem to have a concept of object permanence. If they go to the other side of the fence and do not find the ball, they will tend to begin a spiraling search for it, rather than concentrate on where the ball logically should be if you tracked the trajectory of it and formed a concept of where it went even after it left your sight.

Likely because their brain is optimized to find live prey, which tends to move around and take evasive actions. Intuitively understanding parabolic motion physics is probably not that useful in the wild.

Re: Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

#54

Post by observationist »

inglor_cz wrote: post #37
bitwize wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What blew my mind was when one of the first dogs to use buttons was confronted with her "beach" button being broken. She started using the phrase "outside-water" to compensate for being unable to say "beach". This is like when Alex the parrot was confronted with an apple for the first time and called it a "banerry", using the names of fruits he knew (banana and cherry). The ability not just to use words, but form ori…

"What blew my mind was when one of the first dogs to use buttons was confronted with her "beach" button being broken. She started using the phrase "outside-water" to compensate for being unable to say "beach"." This is actually something that the skeptics should address when they claim that all that button pushing is just simple conditioning. Spontaneously creating a logically sound approximation for a broken button…

My own dog has used "outside water good before" to tell me about going potty outside, but over time, outside water has come to mean rain.

There needs to be an acknowledgement that conditioning does happen, and that animals who don't learn language can still recognize words as signals without having any deeper understanding. With buttons, animals are brought to understand the words through contextual use and modeling of the word - emotions and time and abstractions are taught that take the word beyond mere signaling and conditioning.

If you go back and review reports about Clever Hans, what you find is an overwhelming bias and a perverse incentive to deny any and all "cleverness" the horse may have had in favor of maintaining humanity's sole domain of complex and abstract thought. Clever Hans could likely accomplish simple arithmetic. Nearly everyone who "debunked" the claims at the time was hopelessly biased and tangled up with their own worldviews. Horses are brilliant. I've met horses that are smarter than many people I know. (I've also met horses that were sociopathic asshats without any redeeming personality traits, but that's a story for a different thread.) If dogs can learn complex, abstract language and simple counting with a brain the size of a ping pong ball or a peach, a horse brain 4-8 times larger is going to be much more capable and facile.

I think this type of research that takes an unbiased and rational approach to animal cognition will lead to better outcomes for everyone. There's a lot that veterinarians and biologists are taught with roots deep in religious myths and cultural tropes, so it's left a large and mostly untapped field of discovery available for a new generation.

Re: Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

#55

Post by observationist »

cgriswald wrote: post #52
inglor_cz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How should such a study even look like? I mean, some people are perfectly fine with labeling other people NPCs.

I don't think I would want to design such a study, but at a minimum arguments would have to be made ahead of time for meaningful pairings "outside-water" == "beach", all button presses would have to be recorded, and then a statistical conclusion could be reached. > I mean, some people are perfectly fine with labeling other people NPCs. Indeed. So whatever such a study concludes is unlikely to change people's ideas ab…

This is actually a study being run - https://www.theycantalk.org/research They are recording button presses and sequences in both controlled and open situations, and have already observed a consistent capacity to chain multiple buttons together in naming a thing, and have found patterns in the names dogs come up with (I think they're also doing cat studies.)

Re: Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

#57

Post by brudgers »

observationist wrote: post #21
brudgers wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe buttons are necessary when humans don't understand dog words? Or to put it another way, buttons demonstrate dogs being multilingual across species...

Words are a human construct - language. Dogs don't naturally have words or language - there's no bark that conveys a static meaning. They do correlate noises, like whines, barks, growls, with things they have experience with, and are clever enough to string complex and abstract concepts together. That level of reasoning and communication is not language, however. What the buttons demonstrate is that dogs are capable…

Dogs don't naturally have words or language

How do you know that?

Re: Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

#58

Post by denimboy »

I knew a dog that had a decent vocabulary. He would visibly react to words like CAR, WALK, or PARK. He also understood PARTY and MEAT and would wag his tail for PART and lick his chops to MEAT. One time we were going to a BBQ so I explained to him we were taking the CAR to a MEAT PARTY and he got super excites, wagging his tail and going to the door all while frothing at the mouth. Anecdotal but it certainly looked like he could synthesize concepts and imagine what was going to happen in the near future.

I've done a few other experiments with my foreign speaking friends and it appeared to me that dogs understand the language their owners speak primarily.

Re: Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

#59

Post by lesuorac »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #41
KittenInABox wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dogs obviously have a concept of object permanence, since they know to go around the fence to look for a ball in the first place. They wouldn't look for it once it's left their sight around a fence otherwise. That they're confused if they cannot immediately find the ball only shows that they struggle to calculate arcs, which many humans also do.

And for anyone with a particularly intelligent but ball obsessed breed of dog you can ask them to get the ball so you can play and they’ll go from the front of the house around the back to pick it up off the top shelf in the shed where you placed it (but forgot yourself, but they remembered) and bring it to you. I absolutely assure you: My border collie knows at all times where the ball is. There’s zero question of o…

I swear people who talk about object permanence have never tested it.

The Wikipedia article about babies even talks about it not starting until month 8 [1]! At least, under "Contradicting evidence" they talk about other studies that showed as early as 3 months ...

I think people just want to feel special and just can't accept that other animals have the same abilities that we do.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence#Stages

Re: Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

#60

Post by kcplate »

not_the_fda wrote: post #15
crooked-v wrote: post #2

So where are all the people who apparently think that pets can't understand basic vocabulary? It's treated like some wild revelation when it comes up in articles like this, but anyone who's ever had a dog or cat knows what the reactions are like when words like "walk" or "bath" or "tuna" get mentioned. For particularly attentive dogs you can even end up with the euphemism treadmill from "walk" to "W-A-L-K" to substit…

Lots of people think animals are dumb beasts. My neighbor threw a party with a bunch of people in his PhD program. Our dogs hang out and we left the gate open between our properties so the dogs could go back and forth. One of the PhD students was amazed that if you threw a ball over the fence the dog knew how to go around the fence and through the gate to get the ball.

When our dog’s toy rolled under the couch he went and retrieved a flyswatter we keep in the cleaning closet and brought it to me. He had seen me use this only one other time when his toy rolled under there.
Post reply on HN