- 16 hours ago
The Nature Of Things - Season 65 Episode 7 - Can Dogs Talk
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00:00You ever wonder what your dog is thinking?
00:24Water.
00:25Now, some dog owners say they know.
00:28Look.
00:30Thanks to buttons that seem to give dogs the ability to talk.
00:34Oh.
00:35It's like, how is this even possible?
00:39Okay.
00:40Outside.
00:41Some dogs are saying so much that scientists have decided, we've got to study them.
00:46Button.
00:47Creep.
00:48Yes.
00:49Go get it.
00:50We need to look into this.
00:52They've set up the largest animal communication study in history.
00:58Thousands of dogs from around the world.
01:03What we want to see is where can we take this and how far can dogs go?
01:09We know that our bond with dogs is incredibly tight.
01:12Oh, you did so good.
01:13But could we really teach them to speak our language?
01:17So you have dogs that can translate on behalf of other dogs to humans.
01:21On behalf of other dogs.
01:22That is mind blowing.
01:25She knows what she's saying.
01:27She's communicating with me.
01:29Couldn't it just be owners reading too much into things?
01:35What's really going on here?
01:37Hello.
01:38Are they just pushing our buttons?
01:40They love you.
01:41Or can dogs talk?
01:43Hey.
01:44The whole phenomenon of talking dogs starts with one very special dog.
01:58Check this out.
02:04This is Stella.
02:06It's late, but Stella isn't ready for bed.
02:16Stella appears to be talking.
02:18You want to go to the park?
02:20It's a little late to go to the park.
02:22This video has been sped up a little, but otherwise nothing's been edited in or out.
02:29Do you want to go for a walk instead?
02:31Yes.
02:32Walk.
02:33Okay.
02:34Okay.
02:35We'll go for a walk.
02:36Let's get your leash on.
02:39Leash.
02:40On.
02:41Okay.
02:42Okay.
02:43We'll go for a walk.
02:46Let's get your leash on.
02:49Leash.
02:50On.
02:51On.
02:52Stella has been taught to use word buttons.
02:56Walk.
02:57Her owner, Christina Hunger, can record different words on each of the buttons.
03:02Stella.
03:03And by using them, Stella became known as the world's first talking dog.
03:09What?
03:10This is amazing.
03:12So this is the board.
03:13This is where it all happened.
03:14This is.
03:15That's right.
03:16How many buttons are there in total?
03:17There's 48 on this board right now.
03:20Like why would you do this?
03:21Like what would you make you think you could do something like this?
03:24So I was a speech language pathologist.
03:26I worked with kids every day who used communication devices to talk.
03:30And then when I brought Stella home, I just saw how much she was already communicating with her gestures, her nonverbal language, her barks and whines.
03:39And it got me thinking maybe if they had a different way to say words other than verbal speech that they could say it too.
03:46So Christina got her some buttons to try.
03:50I wasn't just training her to push a button and giving her a treat.
03:55Never once did that.
03:56I was showing her how to use it in the right context and seeing if she would learn.
04:00Even when Stella became interested in the buttons, it took a while before she managed to actually press one.
04:07You're so close, Stella.
04:12But finally, she cracked it.
04:15And the next morning, Christina caught it on camera.
04:18Let's go outside.
04:20Hi.
04:21I was very excited.
04:23And then when she went outside, she went to the bathroom right away.
04:28She was using a word appropriately and functionally.
04:32I just jumped into gear and found more buttons and taught more concepts.
04:39Christina.
04:40Can you ask her questions and she'll answer using these?
04:42Is that the way usually it works?
04:44So normally she just uses them completely independently.
04:47Like when she has something that she wants to say, she'll come over and use her buttons.
04:51Or if I ask like what she wants to do, she'll normally answer with an activity.
04:56If I ask her when she wants to do something, it'll always be now.
05:03As Stella started to use her buttons more, Christina began sharing her videos online.
05:09We left our apartment one day and we set up a camera just to see, you know, what she would do while we were gone.
05:16I had never heard her made a sound like that.
05:26It was heartbreaking.
05:31Stella blew up online and her videos turned her into a social media phenomenon.
05:41We're joined now by Christina Hunger, a speech pathologist in San Diego, owner of the very clever Stella.
05:48Okay.
05:49So, Christina, what does Stella say the most?
05:51She definitely says outside the most. She absolutely loves being outside.
05:55As news of Stella and her word button spread,
06:00No, stand up.
06:01Others, so-called talking dogs, have flooded social media with their seemingly amazing feats of communication.
06:08Mommy!
06:10These dogs seem to be using our words.
06:16But is that enough to say that they're talking?
06:20Do they really understand what they're saying?
06:23Or is their button pushing just random?
06:28I love you too, Cobb. I love you too.
06:35To find out, I've come to see Federico Rossano, director of the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego.
06:44You are running the largest dog study. How do you even describe it? What are you doing?
06:49It's the largest citizen science study on animal communication ever attempted.
06:54Right.
06:55We have more than 10,000 participants from 47 countries.
06:59And these participants have been training their dogs for years.
07:03That's a huge study.
07:04It's a huge study.
07:05But at first, Federico didn't want to have anything to do with button pressing dogs.
07:11How can we know that this is actually happening and there's no queuing, that the owner has not just trained and then recorded the clip so that, you know, you can show it.
07:19After all, we know that you could train a pigeon to open boxes.
07:22So it's like, there's things you could do if you just do it enough times.
07:25Right.
07:26But despite Federico's concerns about social media, he saw some clips that he just couldn't ignore.
07:32You start looking at some of these clips, you start noticing something that is a little different from what you expect.
07:38Yeah.
07:39Let me just show you one of these clips.
07:42Mad.
07:43Why are you mad?
07:46Why mad?
07:58Where is your ouch?
08:00Where ouch?
08:02In your ear?
08:06Where are your stranger?
08:07In your paw?
08:16Let me see your paw.
08:21Okay, I'm going to put this down on chain.
08:27This is the stranger in her paw.
08:29She's got a mat between her...
08:30Ow, toes.
08:31So they seem to be able to kind of do some back and forth with the humans.
08:37And there seems to be the ability to put more than one...
08:41Using more than one word at the same time in a sequence.
08:43Right.
08:44Kind of like a sentence.
08:45To combine ideas.
08:46Right.
08:47And so when you look at this, it's pretty impressive.
08:50We are seeing from different dogs things that could be really interesting if true.
08:55Okay, port, port there.
09:00The trouble is, past efforts to teach animals to use our language have been incredibly controversial.
09:08Which color?
09:10That one?
09:11The blue one.
09:12The way it was done was basically a researcher would get one animal and then train this animal to learn, for example, sign language or to learn how to use other devices.
09:27Sometimes it looked like something extraordinary.
09:30But if you only have one animal, it's very hard to tell how that came about or what that really means from the perspective of cognition and what that means about how they're thinking.
09:40After several studies focused on one or two animals taken out of their natural habitats and with concern about researchers over-interpreting results, the entire field of research was called into question.
09:54So when the button dogs emerged on social media, many of Federico's colleagues thought he'd be crazy to get involved.
10:01I had scientists calling me, saying, do you know what you're getting yourself into?
10:07You might actually lose your job because of what you're doing.
10:10But this study would be different, based on more than just one or two highly trained subjects.
10:18Much, much more.
10:21Thousands and thousands of dogs.
10:24To help make the study as legitimate as it could be.
10:29Given its scope, Federico asked Amalia Bastos, a researcher in animal cognition, to join him.
10:36Where can we take this and how far can dogs go?
10:39We need to actually test things out empirically to find out what's going on.
10:43Federico and Amalia have been recruiting participants from across the world.
10:48Dix, viens!
10:50While some are manually recording data for use in the study, many participants are using buttons that automatically record what words are pressed and when.
11:00Every time a button is pressed, that goes straight into the app and then we can download through the app the kind of data that has been collected.
11:15To properly investigate this whole phenomenon, Federico first needs to check that the dogs actually understand the words on the buttons when they hear them.
11:24Good boy.
11:25Yeah.
11:26I thought I might see a study in their lab room, but it's totally empty.
11:33We actually don't bring dogs into the lab.
11:36Dogs are trained in their own homes and we go to people's homes to actually collect data.
11:41Why is it important to do a study of where the dog lives?
11:44You need to imagine, like, how do you behave when you go to the doctor when you are in your office versus how do you behave when you're home?
11:53How do you feel comfortable, natural, not necessarily under pressure?
11:59Right.
12:00And I think it creates an environment where you can actually show your abilities if this is there.
12:05I want to show you something that is actually one of the studies that we've been doing.
12:08Okay, yeah.
12:09This is Mach-Eye.
12:10You're so calm.
12:12Federico and Amalia need to test whether a word generated by a button means the same thing to a dog as when that same word is spoken by a person.
12:22He's having some water.
12:25Because when we say words, we add all sorts of extra details.
12:29Pitch, volume, body language.
12:31You are the messiest drinker.
12:34But a word from a button is the same every time.
12:38The first study had to be, do the dogs that are trained with these buttons understand the meaning of the words that are associated with it?
12:47And can we show that they would respond not just to their owners, but they would respond to others pushing those buttons?
12:53All right.
12:54This is client trial number four.
12:57The experimenter wears headphones, so she can't hear what word button she will press.
13:03And the owners are blindfolded, so no one can give away any clues.
13:10And then you see the dog goes straight for the toy basket, retrieves the ball, like, let's play.
13:20And so it's contextually appropriate with respect to what button had just been pressed.
13:26It's the simplest possible test.
13:3158 other dogs were also tested.
13:34Chrissy?
13:35Chrissy?
13:36Outside.
13:38And the results showed that dogs respond appropriately to the play and outside buttons with no other cues.
13:45Just as they would respond to those words spoken directly by a human.
13:49That was critical for us because if they did not respond in a way that would suggest they understand it, then there's no point in moving forward with any other research.
13:59So it's now clear that dogs can respond to at least some button words.
14:06Okay.
14:07The next question is, how well can dogs use them?
14:13But first...
14:14It's massive!
14:15How many words does the average dog seem to know?
14:18I love you!
14:19I am here at a dog show, and I'm not expecting to find any talking dogs here, but it's probably a pretty good place to understand how they understand us.
14:39Hello!
14:41You're so cute!
14:44I'm here to meet Sophie Jacques, Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
14:53We're at a dog show.
14:55What can a developmental psychologist learn from studying dogs?
14:58So I study language development in children, and the differences between dogs and babies in learning language, as well as the similarities, can tell us a lot about what's going on in both kinds of species.
15:12We talk to dogs in the ways that are very similar to how we talk with babies.
15:16When measuring language ability in infants, researchers often use word lists, filled out by parents who report what words they believe their baby understands.
15:28Sophie produced the same kind of list, but for doggies.
15:33So this is a list of words that we developed to measure the same thing in dogs.
15:38So we figured that if parents were really good at picking out what words they think their babies know, maybe dog owners would be...
15:47You're telling me this is a list of words that dogs know?
15:49Yes.
15:50This is a list of words that dogs know. It's massive!
15:56In general, dog owners are reporting that their dogs know about 80 to 85 words.
16:01That's a huge number of words.
16:03I mean, when you think about the average, what, one-year-old or maybe two-year-old, the list is about the same, isn't it?
16:08Yeah, so a one-year-old, parents report they respond to about 80 words.
16:13So about the same number of words.
16:14Wow!
16:15But there are big differences in the list.
16:16Most of those words are objects, they're nouns.
16:19For dogs, most of those words are commands or actions.
16:24So sit, stay, come.
16:26Whereas with babies, it might be bottle, mummy.
16:29And words we think of as objects, a dog might relate to differently.
16:35They'll recognize words like car, so do you want to go for a car ride?
16:39Right.
16:40Now the question is, do they recognize the word car or mat as an object or as a place to go?
16:45They hear car and they go to the car.
16:47Yes, yes, that's right.
16:48They think go to there.
16:49It's an action word.
16:50Sit.
16:51With so many words that dogs seem to respond to...
16:53Good boy!
16:54How close could they be to actually using our language?
16:57So what would it take to convince you that a dog can talk?
17:02Well, a language is more than knowing a hundred words or a thousand words.
17:06It's more than just knowing words.
17:08Language has purpose, it has meaning, it has structures.
17:12It is a system of symbols that is organized in a very precise way.
17:17Right.
17:18Good job.
17:19Just because dogs respond to lots of different words in a particular language...
17:22Good man.
17:23Ready, ready, ready.
17:24Over!
17:25...doesn't necessarily mean they comprehend that language.
17:29That's so good.
17:30And even when they're pressing buttons correctly, it's hard to know how much they understand.
17:36Good boy, you're going to try not to bark at stuff today?
17:40Yeah.
17:46Can you go to bed?
17:47Go to bed.
17:48This is Rohan, Amalia's 23-month-old Australian Shepherd.
17:54Ready?
17:55Break.
17:56Button.
17:57Creak.
17:58Yeah, so good. Go get it.
18:02Thanks.
18:04Love you.
18:05Good boy.
18:06Go to bed.
18:07Good boy.
18:08So what we saw looked like a conversation where the dog understood what it was saying and we had it back and forth.
18:15In actual fact, these were trained interactions where the dog was actually just trained to press the buttons as a trick.
18:21Button.
18:22Good boy.
18:23Good boy.
18:24Good boy.
18:25Good boy.
18:26Good boy.
18:27Good boy.
18:28That's the one.
18:29He doesn't actually know what that button means.
18:32I could have had a bird chirp or I could have had, you know, siren sound.
18:36It could have been literally anything and he would have performed the behavior exactly the same way.
18:40Love you.
18:41Love you.
18:42You know, the fact that they're human language words is completely arbitrary.
18:47Love you.
18:48It's just associative learning.
18:50Rohan has learned to associate an action, like pressing a button, with an outcome, like getting a treat.
18:58It's known as associative learning or conditioning.
19:02But it doesn't mean he knows what the words treat or thanks or love you actually mean.
19:08Everything in life starts through associative learning and actually humans learn through associative learning.
19:13Good boy.
19:14Associative learning is common to pretty much all animals.
19:17Freak.
19:18And it doesn't require any sort of complex cognition that we should be impressed by.
19:22Right.
19:23You could easily teach a mouse to press buttons.
19:26Okay, you got that one.
19:28And that's the big problem.
19:30Just because they can press buttons that say words doesn't necessarily mean that the dogs have any real understanding of what those words mean.
19:38Right.
19:39So how much of all this button pressing could really just be random?
19:43I love you.
19:44In principle, the dog could just be spamming the soundboard, just coming there, touching buttons randomly.
19:56If it's random, we should stop doing this research, right?
20:02Why are you looking into something that's completely random?
20:06Click.
20:07Click.
20:08Or what if the dogs are just pressing buttons that are easy to reach?
20:12What can happen, of course, is that the dog might just end up pushing, for example, these two buttons that are close to each other just because they are adjacent to each other and it's just easy for them.
20:24And so it is very important for us to know not just which buttons they have, participants have, but also how they are laid out so that we can, for example, run analysis to see the dogs seem to be actually doing something intentionally.
20:40But after two years of analyzing over 10 million button presses by thousands of dogs, Federico is seeing clear patterns emerge.
20:50What are some of the most common words that dogs are saying?
20:52So outside, play and food, the size of the word tells you something.
20:57Treat, of course, water, scritches, walk, want.
21:03So part of the idea is that, you know, the words that I use the most are words that make sense for a dog.
21:09And again, so some of these things, they don't use a lot other words that might not be quite in line with what we expect, like training or mad or friend.
21:22So on the whole, button use is not random.
21:27If it was random, you would just have all the buttons that you have on the soundboard have an equal probability of being pressed.
21:33OK, some dogs press an outside button when they want to go outside.
21:41Should we be impressed?
21:43In principle, there is no difference between pushing the buttons and saying outside and trying to tell you by scratching on the door that they want to go outside.
21:52It's another way of communicating.
21:57So is it possible for dogs to do more than just communicate in these simplest of ways?
22:02What would it mean for them to use language?
22:05All animals communicate.
22:07All animals communicate and can understand communication.
22:10But not all communication is language.
22:14Arik Kirschenbaum studies animal communication at the University of Cambridge in England.
22:19I think really communication becomes language when you cross that boundary from a signal that manipulates other individuals
22:27to a system by which information is exchanged between individuals who understand that their conversation partner is also participating in that conversation.
22:41Could dogs and humans cross that boundary and engage in a deeper exchange?
22:45It's hard to imagine our dogs actually speaking to us, but we have to remember that they evolved with us over the course of thousands of years.
22:56And that would have changed their behavior in some pretty profound ways.
23:03All dogs evolved from wolves, their wild ancestors.
23:08More than 10,000 years ago, some wolves were taken in by humans and domesticated.
23:13Over generations spent living with and around us, they changed in different ways according to how we bred them.
23:23We selected traits that we valued, leading to breeds that were smaller and cuter, or faster and slimmer.
23:30Or bigger and stronger.
23:33And of course, over time, we favored dogs that could communicate well with us.
23:38Dogs that were good at understanding what we're trying to say.
23:43And a small percentage of dogs worldwide really do seem to have an extraordinary grasp of our words.
23:51Take Gaia, for instance, a six-year-old border collie.
23:57Isabella Ruiz is her owner.
23:58Here, Gaia.
23:59Here, Gaia.
24:01Here, Gaia.
24:03While most dogs are good at learning action words like sit and stay, not many seem to recognize the names of more than a few objects.
24:11But that's not the case with Gaia.
24:14Gaia has 215 toys now.
24:17She knows all of them by name.
24:20It's a lot of toys now for us to remember.
24:23So, we did a catalog of the toys to remember their names.
24:28But Gaia always knows the toys.
24:30So, yeah, I think her memory is better than ours.
24:34Isabella enrolled Gaia in a study called the Genius Dog Challenge, run by Claudia Fugatza.
24:39She's traveled here all the way from Hungary, where she works at one of the world's leading canine research centers.
24:47Gaia is one of what we call the gifted word learner dogs.
24:52And these are dogs that have a very special talent for learning the name of toys.
24:58And they learn very fast.
25:01Only a few dogs around the world seem to have this capacity.
25:05Hello.
25:07Hi, Gaia.
25:08Hello, girl.
25:10She's here to put Gaia to the test.
25:15She wants to find out whether Gaia's cognitive skills might go beyond learning names and recall.
25:21Coffee.
25:23Can Gaia work out what a toy might be called based only on how she plays with it?
25:27Gaia knows that tug and fetch are games she can play.
25:33New toys?
25:35And last week she was given two new toys.
25:38One to tug and one to fetch.
25:41This one.
25:42I play like this.
25:44Isabella hasn't given the toys any names and hasn't said the words tug or fetch when playing with them.
25:50This one.
25:51I've been playing like this, but I don't say the name of the categories, so yeah.
25:55Yeah.
25:56Is Gaia smart enough to work out which is a fetch toy and which is a tug toy?
26:02Yeah, good girl.
26:05So are they able to sort those items into the tug or the fetch category just based on the way you play?
26:12The way you play.
26:13The way you play?
26:14The way you play.
26:15The way you play.
26:16What do I play...
26:18the fetch?
26:22Good girl.
26:23Good girl.
26:25Good girl.
26:26You got the Nothing.
26:33Good girl.
26:36Gaia...
26:37Where's Thug? Where's Thug?
26:51Good girl! Good girl!
26:55Well, I have to say I had no idea how this would go,
26:59but that was really, really exciting.
27:01She was able to assign this toy to the named category
27:05without ever having heard that name paired with that toy.
27:09Totally, I believe this is a big step
27:11in our understanding of dogs' minds.
27:15What Gaia has done seems different
27:17from just simple conditioning or associative learning.
27:21For sure, Gaia could not have associated the name,
27:25fetch or Thug, to the specific item
27:28because she has never heard that name
27:31while seeing that toy or while playing with that toy.
27:34This is not possible. She could not have learned that this way.
27:38It seems some dogs can understand
27:41that a word can refer to a whole category of objects.
27:44It doesn't necessarily have to refer to one specific thing.
27:48Go! Yay!
27:50But that's just words that they're hearing.
27:52The owners are not allowed to speak to the dog,
27:55point or gesture at the dog, nothing at all.
27:58Could some dogs be genius enough to use their word buttons
28:02in totally new contexts?
28:04Oh, hi! Do you need help?
28:06Do you need help?
28:19Meet Parker.
28:20She is a beagle cross and she is all about using those word buttons.
28:25Water.
28:26So Parker is a bit atypical.
28:29When we first got them, it took her about 30 seconds,
28:33maybe not even, to press her first button.
28:35And by the end of that kind of evening,
28:38she had pressed, at least experimentally, all six of them.
28:42Snuggle, snuggle.
28:44Can you watch, snuggle? Come here.
28:47Parker is being tested by Amalia, Federico's colleague,
28:50with something called the impossible task.
28:53It's designed to see if a dog who has a help button on a soundboard
28:57will use it in a situation it has never encountered before.
29:03So with most of the buttons that dogs have,
29:05like food or play or walk,
29:07these are simple associations that are related to one particular context.
29:11Help.
29:12Help is interesting because it's a little bit more general
29:15than a lot of the simpler buttons that these dogs might have.
29:18Sit.
29:19Good girl. Wait there.
29:21So the way that the study is set up
29:23is we have this mat on the floor here
29:25and it's got a Tupperware in the middle.
29:27First, the owners give the dogs opportunities over four different trials
29:30to obtain a food reward from inside the Tupperware.
29:32And at that point, the lid is open.
29:35And at all these stages, the dog can knock off the lid
29:37and eat the food inside the Tupperware without much difficulty.
29:40Until the very final trial, the fifth trial, the Tupperware is completely locked.
29:45And that's the point at which the dog might need help to access the food.
29:49The owners are not allowed to speak to their dog,
29:51point or gesture at the dog, look at their dog, nothing at all.
29:54I didn't know what Parker would do in that circumstance, whether she would use the buttons or not.
30:02I can see she's immediately gone to Sasha and she's climbed onto Sasha's back trying to get her attention.
30:09But what we're interested in is can these dogs then make that leap and use a word.
30:14Help. Look.
30:17She presses help, look, and then she looks to Sasha.
30:23Parker had never before been presented with this scenario,
30:26and so had never used the words look or help in this context.
30:30Help. Help. Look. Look.
30:33So because it's the very first time that they've seen this, it tells us two things.
30:36It tells us that behavior wasn't trained,
30:38and it tells us that the dog is having to think about what this requires from them
30:44in terms of communication to their owner,
30:46and that they need to generalize a button that they've not used in this context before.
30:49Help. Help. Help.
30:51It seems from this experiment that Parker understands that the word help can be used in a broad range of scenarios,
30:59revealing a level of cognition beyond just simple association.
31:03Oh, hi. Do you need help?
31:08There you go.
31:12As well as using words in new, untrained ways,
31:15a huge step would be if dogs were using words to do more than just ask for things.
31:20What we're actually interested in is whether dogs might be able to use the soundboard,
31:25not just as a vending machine where they're requesting things from humans,
31:29but actually understand it as a communicative device.
31:33So humans do not just request things. Humans can inform.
31:38It's a thing that humans do all the time. Toddlers start doing it.
31:41They will point at the moon and say moon, and you know, they're not requesting the moon.
31:44They're just letting you know the moon is there.
31:46Parker uses the buttons to narrate a decent amount.
31:51She has narrated me watering the plants quite a bit.
31:55She'll narrate also things she does sometimes.
31:58Settle.
32:01She's pressed settle before and then just gone into her bed and lie down.
32:08She didn't get anything from me for it.
32:10She just pressed settle and then she settled.
32:13Of course, it's impossible to know for sure whether Parker really was commenting on what she was doing.
32:20But other dogs like Copper, a three and a half year old Labrador, also seem to be using buttons to do more than just make requests.
32:29Outside pool.
32:31Outside pool. Outside pool, maybe tomorrow.
32:39Outside pool later.
32:42Outside pool.
32:43Later.
32:44Oh my goodness. Copper.
32:51It looks like Copper was using her buttons to express emotion.
32:55But of course, we don't know for sure.
32:58An animal could learn that pressing the sad button gets attention.
33:03And once they've learned that, they can manipulate these different concepts in quite complex ways without understanding there's a semantic meaning behind it.
33:16Outside pool later.
33:21From the data he's receiving from button boards, Federico tells me that according to their owners, dogs are using buttons to do a lot more than just ask for things.
33:31This is human responses?
33:33This is what the human tells you when the buttons are pushed, what they think the dog is doing.
33:39So, it's interesting for us because you would expect most of the things to be a request for action.
33:44And you expect some informing or attention seeking, sharing thoughts and feelings. Can they talk about emotions?
33:50It happens 5% of the time, but it's happening and maybe we should look more into it.
33:5550% of button presses were recorded as requests.
33:59But there are other categories where dogs seem to be doing stuff that I find shocking.
34:04And this, to me, is one of the most fascinating ones.
34:09Speaking for others.
34:11What happens sometimes is that you have multiple learners in the household, so there might be like two dogs or three dogs.
34:17Okay.
34:18And one is proficient with the sound board can use the buttons and the other one doesn't.
34:22And so you have the one that can use it is actually telling the humans about what the other one wants.
34:28And so they might tell you, for example, the other one wants water or the other one needs help.
34:33So you have dogs that can translate on behalf of other dogs to humans.
34:38On behalf of other dogs.
34:39Correct.
34:40That is mind-blowing.
34:41And that's why it's very exciting for us because even though it's fair, imagine what it could mean.
34:48For now, these reports are certainly tantalizing, but it's just what owners believe their dogs are communicating.
34:55Knowing for certain what a dog means when it uses words or what it thinks when it hears one is far harder.
35:04And it's got some scientists wondering, maybe we should look in their brains.
35:08So right now I'm putting on the electrodes.
35:21In Budapest, Hungary, Marianna Boros wants to find out what's happening inside a dog's brain when it hears words it notes.
35:31For most people, we have a mental representation of things from the external words.
35:37So we have a mental representation of an object, some kind of a memory of that thing.
35:43We can imagine it in a way that we hear the word ball.
35:47We will see in our mental imagery a ball.
35:51Marianna wants to test whether dogs' brains might work similarly.
35:56When a dog hears a word, does it conjure up an image of that thing in its head?
36:00Hello!
36:01To find out, she's going to study the brain activity of Demi, an 11-year-old Swiss shepherd.
36:12So, right now I'm putting on the electrodes on Demi's head.
36:16That's what measures the brain signal.
36:22Demi's owner, Timmy, has brought in some of Demi's toys.
36:26Then Demi hears a message telling her what toy she's about to see.
36:29Demi, let's see, teleport.
36:36Sometimes, Timmy shows her that toy.
36:40But sometimes, Timmy shows a different toy.
36:45The idea is that if the dog sees a different object, it should be somehow surprised, and this surprise effect should be visible in the EG signal.
36:56Demi, mutatom, teleport.
37:02What we can see here is that if a dog saw an object that matched the word that he just heard, this is the response that we get.
37:09But when we violate their expectations, so we show a different object, then we get a more positive response in the EG signal.
37:18Mariana believes that this difference in the signals indicates that dogs have mental representations of objects.
37:26We can claim, based on this study, that when they hear the name of an object, they activate something, the so-called memory of this object.
37:34So we think that the dog is actually surprised when it sees a different thing, but it is surprised because it has an expectation and because it understands the meaning of that word.
37:48That's a qualitatively different way of using language as opposed to associative learning.
37:56So, yes, I would say there's a possibility that they understand words similarly to us.
38:05Of course, this is still an interpretation.
38:09But if dogs do understand words in similar ways to us, could they start putting them together and using them in more complex ways?
38:16To find out, we need to look at the dogs that use a lot of buttons.
38:24Okay, we can go outside first. Come on, girl.
38:29The Holy Grail would be to find dogs that are capable of using their limited words to express new ideas that they don't have buttons for.
38:42An ability known as productivity.
38:45Linguistic productivity is absolutely central to the way that humans do language.
38:50But what makes humans special is that we can communicate to each other anything, any concept.
38:57So that cognitive ability is very, very powerful and very, very rare in the animal world.
39:03In order to look at productivity, you need to have dogs that can combine at least two buttons.
39:09As of yesterday, we have 790 dogs in our pool that do multi-button combinations.
39:14Maybe there's going to be 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 20 that actually have the ability to kind of refer to things that you don't have a word for or by combining other signals.
39:25We have anecdotal reports from some of them that they seem to be doing it.
39:32So Stella has a beach button. We used to live right by the beach. She loved going to the beach. We went almost every day.
39:38Right.
39:39And when it broke, we took it off because we had to fix it.
39:41And she sniffed right where the empty spot was, where her beach button should be.
39:46And then she said, help, water, outside.
39:50Help. Hey.
39:54Okay.
39:56So she used water and outside to say beach because she didn't have the beach button available to her.
40:03So she's coming up with new concepts, combining words the way that people do to express ideas.
40:08Exactly. So she, it was like her own synonym for beach. It's, oh, I can't say beach, so I'll say water outside.
40:15That's incredible.
40:16Yeah.
40:17Did you freak out?
40:18Yeah.
40:19Definitely freaked out.
40:21It's impossible to know whether Christina's interpretation is correct.
40:25But clips like these are helpful for Federico to highlight possible areas for future research.
40:31Hey!
40:33Okay.
40:34This is the reason I'm doing it, even though people told me I might lose my job.
40:39Um, it's because I've seen things like that.
40:42I've seen animals putting together two or three buttons in ways that look like that were producing sentences.
40:48But of course you should not stop there because that thing could have been trained.
40:51Okay.
40:52We'll go to the beach.
40:54It might look like productivity, but we don't know for sure that it is.
40:57I do find interesting that she pressed buttons that are near beach.
41:01Hey!
41:03I would have loved to know if she would have done the same if, say, beach was on the other side of the soundboard.
41:09Although Stella had never before used those buttons together, testing what she meant by them after the event is impossible.
41:16Still, it's a really interesting sign.
41:21Oh, are you very excited?
41:24So, can dogs talk?
41:28I think Parker can communicate using English language words.
41:33Do you want to do training?
41:35No.
41:37Okay!
41:39Do you want to do training then?
41:42If you want to call that talking, great.
41:46I say that Stella talks because she's using words to communicate.
41:52The fact that it's not a trained behavior and that it's independent and that she can use words to mean a lot of different things indicates language, not just a conditioned trick.
42:05It's not surprising that owners with their close relationships and strong communicative bonds might feel that their dogs are talking.
42:13But scientific understanding of their linguistic capabilities is still in its early days.
42:18We're very much at the beginning of what we're doing and we need to be ready to collect data for years and years.
42:29And to me, the exciting part is that maybe you can see something that nobody else could see before because we just didn't have access to all this data.
42:38Joey!
42:39We're really at the start of this journey of understanding animal cognition, animal communication and where that lies on that spectrum between language and non-language.
42:51Where?
42:52Where?
42:53Where?
42:54Where?
42:55Where by?
42:56Are you asking where you're going?
42:57Are you going to go see Natalie?
42:58No one believes dogs will ever reach our level with language, that's clear.
43:12Does it matter if the sentence you're saying is grammatical or not as long as you're getting your point across and you're actually benefiting from that to weigh communication?
43:20I don't think so.
43:22Whether dogs are using language or not, with a new tool in their communication kit and access to our words, it's possible that the close bonds between humans and dogs could become even closer.
43:42Things question pines they ask?
43:43Everything about hogs a spectrum though.
43:44Everyone thinks so sometimes, trying to believe in입니다, and tho were shutting out of the change that houston though in order they're making lots oforem.
43:57People think so.
43:59I'd love to see sika's a particular criteria for such nature.
44:02People think so many and chariots that are entirely easy in Asia, of course in Europe.
44:05And it's possible that you're beginning to see in Asia ideas in which the big issue happened in Australia.
44:07And an interesting trend that all of you passou through to the culture of presence, everything that weren't always moving forward and just renewal in exactly how you've been thinking to it is.
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