Department of Ethology, ELTE, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/c, Budapest, 1117, Hungary.
Department of Animal Breeding, Nutrition and Laboratory Animal Science, University of Veterinary Medicine, István utca 2, Budapest, 1078, Hungary.
Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 23;13(1):3150. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-30201-1.
Since the dawn of comparative cognitive research, dogs were suspected to possess some capacity for responding to human spoken language. Neuroimaging studies have supported the existence of relevant mechanisms, but convincing behavioral performance is rare, with only few exceptional dogs worldwide demonstrating a lexicon of object-labels they respond to. In the present study we aimed to investigate if and how a capacity for processing verbal stimuli is expressed in dogs (N = 20), whose alleged knowledge of verbal labels is only backed-up by owner reports taken at face value, and concerning only a few words (on average 5). Dogs were tested in a two-choice paradigm with familiar objects. The experiment was divided into a cue-control condition (objects visible to the owner vs. shielded by a panel, thereby controlling the owner's ability to emit cues to the dog) and a response type condition (fetching vs. looking). Above chance performance in fetching and looking at the named object emerged on the level of the sample as a whole. Only one individual performed reliably above chance, but the group-level effect did not depend on this data point. The presence of the panel also had no influence, which supports that performance was not driven by non-verbal cues from the owners. The group-level effect suggests that in typical dogs object-label learning is an instable process, either due to the animals primarily engaging in contextual learning or possibly analogous to the early stages of implicit, statistical learning of words in humans and opposed to the rapid mapping reported in exceptional dogs with larger passive vocabulary.
自比较认知研究的出现以来，人们一直怀疑狗具有对人类口语做出反应的能力。神经影像学研究支持相关机制的存在，但令人信服的行为表现却很少见，全世界只有少数几只具有他们能对特定词汇做出反应的非凡狗狗。在本研究中，我们旨在研究狗（N=20）是否以及如何表达处理口头刺激的能力，这些狗的所谓口头标签知识仅由主人凭经验报告支持，而且只涉及少数几个单词（平均为 5 个）。在一个具有熟悉物体的二选一范式中对狗狗进行了测试。实验分为线索控制条件（主人能看到物体 vs. 物体被面板挡住，从而控制主人向狗发出线索的能力）和反应类型条件（取物 vs. 看）。在整个样本层面上，在取物和寻找命名物体方面的表现都超出了随机水平。只有一个个体的表现可靠地超出了随机水平，但群体水平的效果并不依赖于这个数据点。面板的存在也没有影响，这支持了表现不是由主人的非语言线索驱动的。群体水平的效果表明，在典型的狗中，物体-标签学习是一个不稳定的过程，要么是因为动物主要参与了上下文学习，要么可能类似于人类单词的隐性、统计学习的早期阶段，而不是在具有更大被动词汇量的非凡狗狗中报告的快速映射。
