Six Year Old Border Collie Learns Vocabulary More Extensive Than All of My Co-workers Combined
April 22nd 2011 10:18
John Pilley is an 82 year old psychology professor with a lot of time on his hands, and a dog who's understanding of the human language would put most of American High School students to shame.
Over the past three years, Pilley has spent around five hours a day naming children's toys and other various objects, and teaching his Border Collie, Chaser, to recognize each by their unique name. He's accrued a whopping total of 1,022 objects spanning from children's toys to frisbees. Chaser has learned not only the name associated with each individual toy, but also verbs such as 'nose', 'find', and 'paw'; commands she understands paired with any of her 1,022 toys.
If this feat wasn't impressive enough, PBS host Neil Tyson upped the ante for chaser when he came to visit the pair while hosting a NOVA documentary. After testing Chaser with a random sampling of her regular toys (a test which she passed with flying colors), Tyson threw in a new toy that Chaser had never seen, giving it a name she had never heard; "Darwin". After placing Darwin among a sampling of familiar toys,
Chaser was asked to "find Darwin". Cameras watched as the Border Collie picked through her toys carefully. The first attempt, she came back empty handed, but when the command was made again, after a long pause, Chaser returned to Tyson with the correct Darwin toy.
This act proves that the 'tricks' are Pilley has taught Chaser over the years are far more than just tricks. In order to choose the correct toy, Chaser had to deduce that the name she had never heard before must belong to the toy she had never seen before.
Intelligence like this is becoming more and more common in the science world as scientists turn to dogs to understand early language development in humans. While previously studies like this had been preformed in partnership with chimps and bonobos using sign language, it's been found that dogs have an edge that primates used previously can't compete with; social intelligence.
Dogs have learned to study human social cues such as pointing, and vocal tones to infer meaning. They've also learned to study human faces, picking up on direction of the eyes, and facial expressions. It's become apparent that over the tens of thousands of years that dogs made their transition from wolf to domestic house pet, they developed a social learning ability eerily similar to our own, making dogs the new headliners in social intelligence research.
After stumbling upon this wealth of information, I've learned something too; my dog is a douche who probably understand everything I'm asking him to do, but pee's on the carpet out of spite. Damn you, Loki. Damn you.
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