How clever is your dog? Border collies are stars

Domestic dogs can understand humans well, but a select few have the uncanny ability to remember the names of objects, a new study shows.

Hungarian researchers tested the ability of six Border Collies to remember the names of new toys. As part of the four-part experiment, the dogs were taught up to 12 new words per week, and their ability to remember the toys was then tested over a period of two months.

The researchers had no particular breed in mind when they began recruiting for the study, which was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The goal was to find dogs that are «gifted word learners» or that had already shown they could learn the meaning of many objects.

«The dogs we found after a two-year search for dogs of any breed that had learned the name of their toy happened to be Border Collies«, said the study's lead author, Shany Dror, in an email. Dror is a PhD student in the Department of Ethology (the science of animal behaviour) at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, and head of the Genius Dog Challenge. «However, in an earlier study we also tried to teach other Border Collies toy names, and they did not show this ability. It turns out, then, that this ability is very rare even among Border Collies.«

The Border Collies selected for the study were three females and three males with an average age of 3.6 years, which already knew the names of at least 26 toys.

The process by which the dogs words for new toys were taught was not formal training but was based on the way owners normally play with their pets, Dror explained. The researchers found that owners spoke to their dogs in the same tone and with the same vocabulary as parents speak to their toddlers.

The owner shows the dog the toy and says its name – for example «Look, this is the elephant» – and then starts giving the toy to the dog or throwing it for the dog to fetch, repeating the toy's name a few times, for example «Go and find the elephant'«, according to Dror.

In the experiments, owners were given toys that the dogs had never seen before. In the first experiment, which tested the dogs' ability to learn the names of six toys within a week, the toys were scattered among a number of other new toys and the dogs were asked to fetch each of the toys they knew by name.

In the second experiment, the dogs had a week to learn the names of 12 new toys.

In two further experiments, the dogs' memory was tested after one month and then after two months.

In the first experiment, almost all the dogs remembered the names of all the toys. In the second experiment, two dogs found all 12 new toys again, while four of the dogs found 11 again. Overall, the dogs fetched the correct toy in more than 86% of trials.

A month later, the dogs fetched the correct toy in 61.1% of trials.

After two months, they found the correct toy in just over 57% of trials.

«The most surprising result was that even after two months without seeing the new toys, the dogs could still remember their names», said Dror.

After completing the study, the researchers discovered that dogs of other breeds could also learn new words, including a German shepherd, a Pekingese, a miniature Australian shepherd and several mixed-breed dogs.

What about dogs that do not have the ability to learn many words?

«What we tested is avery specific ability: the ability to learn object names«, said Dror.

«However, all dogs are good at understanding their humans», she said. «They are able to read even the smallest movements we make, and they learn in which context we do what. They are finely attuned to all our activities and can learn a great deal simply by watching us.«