How smart is your dog? Border Collies are stars

Domestic dogs are good at understanding humans, but a select few have the remarkable ability to memorise the names of objects, as a new study shows.

Hungarian researchers tested the ability of six Border Collies to memorise 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 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, with the goal of finding dogs that are «gifted word learners» or have already demonstrated the ability to learn the meaning of many objects.

«The dogs we found after two years of searching for dogs of any breed that had learned the names of their toys happened to be Border Collies«, said the study’s lead author, Shany Dror, in an email. Dror is a doctoral 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. «In an earlier study, however, we also tried to teach other Border Collies the names of toys, and they did not demonstrate this ability. It turns out, then, that this ability is very rare even among Border Collies.«

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

The process by which the dogs teaching new toy names 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 begins to give the toy to the dog or throws it for the dog to fetch, repeating the name of the toy a few times, for example «Go and find the elephant‘«, according to Dror.

In the experiments, owners were given toys their 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 retrieve each of the toys they knew by name.

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

One 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, after two months of not having seen the new toys, the dogs were still able to remember their names», said Dror.

After the study was completed, the researchers discovered that dogs of other breeds were also able to learn new words, including a German Shepherd, a Pekingese, a Mini Australian Shepherd, and some mixed-breed dogs.

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

«What we tested is a very 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 what context we do what. They are finely attuned to all our activities and can learn a great deal by observing us.«