These ‘Talking Buttons’ Are Helping Scientists Understand Animal Intelligence

Veuer

Dog owners are letting their pets use “talking buttons” to express what they want, and it’s changing the way we think about animal intelligence. Veuer’s Matt Hoffman reports.

Transcript

00:00You can train a dog to speak, but you can't train it to use words. Until now.

00:05A new product called Talking Buttons, like this example from Fluent Pet,

00:09allows pet owners to record words like outside or food onto buttons that their

00:14animals can press in order to communicate what they want. According to Vice, the concept was

00:19invented by a speech pathologist named Christina Hunger, who got the idea from her work with

00:24children. And now, these devices are inspiring scientific research into what they can reveal

00:28about animals' capacities to understand and use language. The project They Can Talk is

00:33gathering data on that very subject, though it hasn't yet published any conclusive results.

00:38It's a field that inspires a lot of skepticism. Researcher Amritha Mallikarjan told Scientific

00:43American that dogs can't use language in the same way as humans, and that

00:47there is a lot of confirmation bias. We desperately want them to be saying something to us.

00:52But Talking Buttons have produced anecdotal evidence of creative use of words. Like a

00:57dog that asked for ice by combining the words water and bone, as reported by Vice.

01:02These investigations focus mostly on dogs, but veterinary behaviorist Valli Parthasarathy says

01:07cats can learn in the same way, though good luck getting a cat to do anything.

01:12For now, inquiries into how much intelligence animals are capable of are ongoing.

01:16Maybe someday they can tell us themselves.

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