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Dog Trained on 200-Word Vocabulary
An anonymous reader writes "The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany is reporting in Science Magazine today on an example of successful human to non-human communication: Rico, a collie trained on a vocabulary of 200 words. Their conclusion is that 'brain structures that support this kind of learning are not unique to humans...[Rico has a] retrieval rate comparable to the performance of three-year-old toddlers'. In case you ever wondered if your dog understands what you are saying, Rico 'can learn the names of unfamiliar toys after just one exposure to the new word-toy combination.'"
I remember watching something on 20/20 or a similar show about a Parrot that had the vocabulary of a 6 year old, and I found it very impressive. But it made me wonder, while some animals have been trained to recognize shapes, and perform actions based on those shapes, does anyone know if it'd be possible to train an animal to read (any type of animal besides of course, humans)
To me, I think this would be a very important thing, because some people I know define "soul" as the ability to reason. If we could get an animal to read, and comprehend, atleast a little, of what they were reading, wouldn't that infer some sort of reasoning ability?
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
Am I missing something, Why is an Evolutionary Anthropology center named after Max Plank? Did Plank do some anthropology on the side, or was someone just smoking some crack?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
For instance it's no break through that dogs understand commands, seeing eye dogs have been doing this for decades, but does the language used make a difference? For instance I assume these dogs were trained in German, would French, Spanish or something like Arabic work better? Can a "dog langauge" be made that works better for them, perhaps allowing a 400 word vocab or more?
Last I heard the average human had a vocab of around 2500 words or less. Raising an animals higher could lead to full fledged conversations rather than just an instructional command oriented relationship.
my ex-gf and i had a border collie for over a year. by the end, she (the collie) had a vocabulary of well over 100 words. she knew the difference between the ocean, the lake, and the river. she knew what the "purple squeaky ball" was. her favorite word though was "treat".
a current friend of mine also has a border collie. he is trained to turn off the tv, shut the tv cabinet door, and turn the lights off when his owner falls asleep at night.
i think most border collies are smarter than a lot of people i deal with on a daily basis at work.
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
Just because you can teach the dog a few tricks doesn't mean that he actually has understanding of what he is doing. Humans are the only species cabable of understanding.
There is no such thing as a sentient non-homosapien. There may be varying levels of intelligence among the animals, but no animal can reason, they can only react to their surroundings as dictated by their instincts.
There are many studies that have demonstrated simple reasoning and problem solving on the part of animals. Language is more controversial. Many animals can clearly understand words or symbols and use them to solve problems and achieve goals, but whether this behavior really has the properties of human language is debated.
In captivity have been trained to understand 400-600 or more signals, and even the meaning of putting two signals together to alter the action..
This dog actually seems to be understanding quite a bit of what he is going on. It's not just a matter of finding an object he has learned to associate with a particular sound. There was a show on tele earlier today about this dog and they showed an experiment that went something like this:
The dog has a collection of roughly 200 toys, each of which he knows by name. When told a toy's name, he'll go and fetch the toy. That's not really impressive, that's what most dogs do. Now comes the cool part though. They added a new toy - one the dog had never seen before. The toy was added to the collection while the dog wasn't in the room, so he didn't see the toy being added. Then they told him to get this new toy. Simply by telling him the new toy's name, which he had never heard before of course. Now, the dog went to his toy room. He found all the old toys and the new one. Since none of his old toys matched the name he had been told, he figured that they what they meant must have been this new toy he just discovered.
This is really the reasoning part. You don't need to tell the dog what the toy's name is - the dog will figure it out himself. If you tell him to look for something he's never heard of, he will have a look around and if there's something new and unusual, he will guess that's what you meant. Isn't that sort of the way humans learn? At least it's certainly not the way dogs are normally trained.
Your assertion does not hold water. Vocabulary size is important because it tells us important things about the cognitive ability of dogs. Dogs that are able to learn a large vocabulary are able to keep track of a large number of objects and distinguish between them. No is claiming that Rico has the same capacity for abstract reasoning as even a three year-old child, but this is an impressive accomplishment.
As an aside, I consult with producers and trainers of working dogs (guide dogs, sleddogs, etc.), Two pertinent things that we have learned is that there is a genetic component to trainability (~20%); and that dogs do not always work the way that we think they do -- when a drug detector dog indicates on cocaine they are actually indicating on a byproduct of cocaine manuafacture.
Please do not sell the dogs short, even if they are not yet our new canine overlords.
It has been known for some time that border collies are the "smartest" of all canines. I wonder if any attempts have been made to selectively breed the smartest samples from that breed to see if intelligence can be increased?
Sorry, but I've never met a dog (even an extremely smart dog) that could follow instructions like a 21-month-old child.
This is true. A dog will actually follow instructions.
"Did I tell you not to do that?"
"Uh-huh."
"So why did you?
"Iiiiiii dooooon't Knoooooow."
Brain damage!
On the other hand, by the time my daughter was three, while she still wasn't much for taking instruction, she could converse, reason and had enough abstract thinking to laugh at Shel Silverstein in the right places.
This isn't to say that I don't, and haven't for a long time, considered any number of animals being capable of far more cognition than they typically get credit for, but I'm still waiting for evidence that a dog can understand a joke, although I've always suspected my cat of laughing behind my back at what she's able to get me to do at no benefit to myself whatsoever.
KFG
Chimps and other apes do sometimes fashion tools, which is to say they do more than pick up a rock... they actively shape a twig or branch to do what they want.
But the most impressive, was a crow that bent wire into a hook, to form a tool. Weird, eh?
As for being self-ware, recognizing yourself in a mirror... how useful is that as an indicator? I mean, pick some insect with compound eyes, a bee perhaps. Magically make it intelligent, could it recognize itself? What about some species that is naturally blind?
Also, I believe you people want to use the word sapient, not sentient. I would guess that there isn't a mammal in existence, that isn't sentient to an extent. Forgive me from borrowing from scifi, but Data (Star Trek) was argued to not be sentient, even though he was clearly intelligent. Sentience would be the ability to love, empathize, and lots of other things that are difficult to define.
Another interesting note on animal intelligence... anyone ever bothered to read up on octopi? These things can also solve problems if the reward is food, and they can learn to do so, simply by watching another octopus solve it. What's more, they have been known to climb out of aquariums entirely, across a floor, and into another to eat fish that they see.
Mostly, various religions have ingrained (maybe reinforced) the human tendency to discount any "lesser" animal as worthwhile. In modern times, that tends to amount to discounting their intelligence. I'm not about to stake my life on my cat scoring 190 on an IQ test, but it just seems right to think of her as a person. That tends to be difficult for those who can only assign value to an animal.
And lastly, in this mostly random rant of mine, I pose this question. If human intelligence can vary so greatly, from the barely more than vegetable, up to the ubergenius... why is it so hard to believe the same might be true of animals. And if they were already close to the lowest end of human intelligence, might not the occassional animal ubergenius be comparable to an average person? We might very well stumble across some dolphin that tells us to go fuck ourselves. (though how it will flip us the accompaning finger will frustrate it to no end).
According to Noam Chomsky and colleagues, the difference between humans and all other "intelligent" creatures lies in the ability to recursively combine words into a meaningful sentence (see The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve by Mark Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, published in Science recently-- I'd offer a link, but it's un-free). the size of the vocabulary is irrelevant, because animals can't communicate meaningfully using only single words.
My, arent we feeling superior today?
It is also possible that the dogs you have come across are stupid (yes, it may come as a shock to you but animals intelligence varies too).
OK, lets look at it another way. How many 3 year olds would you trust to lead a blind person around safely and successfully, day after day? And that is not something that is based on instinct either. Personally if I was blind I would chose the dog any day.
I would talk to my last dog in basic natural speech when I wanted him to do something and the vast majority of the time he would understand. Now if I said something like "We are going home" in the back paddock he would start heading home, if I said the same while out somewhere he would head for the car. Are you saying that is not reasoning? If I said "go to the car" he would head to the car irrespective of where he was.
Generally you will find the dog will be as intelligent as you treat it (sort of like people really). If you treat your dog as a "dumb dog" then all he will do is bark all day and dig up the yard. If you talk to him in natural language, and treat him as if he has some intelligence, the vast majority of the time he will respond by acting more intelligent.
Prove it. When's the last time an ape told you he wasn't sentient? There are many ways to determine if an animal is intelligent. One is being self aware. Only larger primates and dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror. Another aspect is knowing of ones' lifespan. Only humans and a few primates are aware of our own demise.
I don't think the mirror-test is an accurate refleciton (no pun intended) of whether an animal is self aware. All a mirror shows is that the animal is aware of its body. And it wouldn't really be too hard to program a robot that could recognise itself in a mirror. Would that make it self aware? Nope. Because your self, your id, is considerably different to your body.
There is no current test for self-awareness. Now, I can tell that I am self aware, because I have a distinct concept of "self". I really can't be sure of anyone else, but I can assume that since others of my species exibit similar behaviour to me, I can reasonably assume that they possess the same trait of self-awareness that I do.
Dolphins and gorillas... Well, I'm not too convinced. They're intelligent, but I don't quite think that they're quite there; the evidence availiable doesn't make a good case, in my opinion. Though I'll admit that this is mainly due to no-one having inventing a convincing self-awareness test, yet.
Problem solving doesn't show an animal is self-aware. Recognising physical objects does not, either. I'm not entirely sure what does, however. Speech helps, of course. It could be that certain language patterns can only arise with self-awareness. It could be that a self-awareness is related to some effect on the quantum level, that cannot be replicated by a Turing Machine. There is some evidence to believe that a Turing Machine cannot represent a self-aware entity.
To be honest, we have such a crude definition of "self", that we'd need to figure out precisely what we mean when we talk about sentience, before we can start to think up tests for it.
Perhaps that will prove to be the greatest scientific challenge of our race.
In fact, if you know just a bit about contemporary research in child language you can pick up the hints in the AP article Pullum links about how it ties in:
This is reminiscent of some of the work of Eve Clark-- which Geoff can't be excused not to know.Are you adequate?
No is claiming that Rico has the same capacity for abstract reasoning as even a three year-old child
While I agree that this isn't the claim they're making, I wouldn't be suprised if such a claim did have some merit. If a bratty 3 yr old wants something, they start squalling. A smart dog can be downright sneaky.
A friend had a dog once, that wasn't allowed outside if the neighbor's cat was out. It would see the cat out the window, and start scratching at the door. For several days this went on, with the dog obviously frustrated. Next day, the dog goes to the living room, sees the cat outside, but instead of scratching, walks to the kitchen where the wife is, and acts as if it's ready to pee on the cabinets. The wife yells at the husband "why didn't you let the dog out" as she opens the backdoor. Husband replies "he just wants out to chase the neighbor's cat", and 2 seconds later the dog is out front chasing the cat back and forth with his asshole neighbor ranting and raving. No reason to believe it had to pee at all. That's at least as deceptive as any 3 yr old is capable of being.
He lived until he was old and sick, and then I went off to college and he chose to commit suicide.
They understand that they can die, and they can choose when they're ready to go.
Look, I lived with border collies for 18 years. They weren't my pets, they were family. After 18 years of watching them, I believe they're not only as smart as people, but that part of the reason some people have problems with their border collies is that the dog is smarter than they are.
The thing is, there are two factors which prevent most people from understanding how smart they really are: one is that they can't talk (although mine tried and startled a few people by croaking out a kind of "hello" they don't really have the right vocal equipment) and the other is that they don't have the same priorities as people do: people worry about going to school and earning money and paying for the next vacation... border collies worry about making sure their family is happy and well, and they see you as their family.
When I was younger my father actually used our labrador retriever to fetch him beer. He would sit in the living room watching TV or something, and the dog would go downstairs to the kitchen, *open the fridge* (it had a pedal-thingy near the floor), grab a bottle of beer and bring it to my father.
Unfortunately the dog couldn't open the bottles, but it at least lived up to the purpose of it's race (retrieving stuff).
but then you admit there's no test for whatever it is you're talking about. Well then just how the hell do YOU know?
Essencially, Descartes.
I get so tired of people who think that other creatures are somehow fundamentally different from us, psychically, emotionally, whatever. EVERY theory (because they are all theories) stating this is nothing more than inherited religious bias MASQUERADING as science. Period. It's so unbelievably, ironically arrogant.
There's plenty of reason to hold this belief. Allow me to repeat what I've said elsewhere. Lets start off with two, reasonable assumptions. I will assume I am self-aware. I will assume that most matter in the Universe is not.
At what point, then, does an animal become self-aware? Clearly, there must be some things that are not self-aware, and some things that are.
I'm working from the skeptical angle. Whilst you claim that my skepticism is religious (odd choice of words), I'm inclined to disagree.
Starting skeptically, I start with the belief nothing is self-aware, and work from there. From assumption one (I-think-therefore-I-am), I can conclude that I am self-aware.
Now, there is a large volume of evidence to support the suggestion that I am human. If I am self-aware, and others of my species exhibit similar behaviour as me, then it is reasonable to conclude that the vast majority of humans are also, probably, self aware.
No other species has yet made a convincing enough case to me on its self-awareness. Any creature is welcome to try.
Its not arrogance. It's not religion. It skepticism.