September 4, 2024, 9:37 am | Read time: 4 minutes
Dogs have a fantastic memory. It has long been known that our four-legged friends know exactly which toy is meant when we say “ball” or “frisbee.” Now, scientists have discovered that dogs still remember the name even if they have not seen the toy for two years.
Do your dog’s toys also have different names? We have the “Devil,” “Balli,” “The Bee,” and “Frisbee”. Our Pomeranian, Yumi, quickly learned these names. She has mastered the names so well that we sometimes have to spell them out so she doesn’t burst into joyful anticipation for anything.
Yumi is not an isolated case. Scientists have discovered that many dogs learn the names of their toys. The record is held by a border collie called Chaser, who could correctly assign the names of over 1000 objects. A team from the Hungarian research group at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest has now discovered that dogs remember the names of their toys for at least two years. They can do this even if they have not seen the toys in that time. The results were published in the journal “Biology Letters.”
Study was conducted with particularly talented dogs
The ability to memorize new words over a longer period of time plays a decisive role in the language development and vocabulary building of young children, the researchers write in their study. In order to investigate how long dogs remember the names of toys, so-called “gifted word learners” (GWL) were used – i.e., dogs that are particularly talented at learning words.
The researchers established the foundation of their study two years prior. They worked with the owners of five dogs that were particularly talented at learning words. In the first part of the study, they taught their four-legged friends the names of 12 completely new objects. These toys were then put away for two years.
Dogs learned twelve new toys, which then disappeared for two years
In the second part of the study, the objective was to investigate how well the dogs recalled the names of the objects. However, some owners made it difficult for the researchers to obtain comparable results. This is because only three of them still had all twelve toys on hand after two years. One dog owner had misplaced an object, and the other could only find five of them.
Before the actual experiment began, the dogs were allowed to inspect the objects that had disappeared for two years at their leisure. Subsequently, their owners placed them in a room alongside eight other toys the dogs frequently used. From a second room, they asked their dog to bring back one of the “lost” toys by saying its name. In order not to distract the animals, the researchers observed everything via cameras.
Dogs are right in over half of the cases
On average, the dogs correctly chose their toys 44 percent of the time. Some of them even had success rates of up to 60 percent. This may not sound particularly high at first. However, the statistical analysis of the data showed that the dogs’ success rates in the experiment were far higher than if they had chosen an object at random.
The dogs memorized the names of three to nine toys. These results would show that dogs are able to store object names in their long-term memory instead of having their memory refreshed by frequently playing with their owners and the corresponding object, the British daily newspaper “The Guardian” quotes Shany Dror, the first author of the study, as explaining.
Results may help to understand the evolution of human language
Since memory plays a crucial role in language development, research on dogs particularly talented at learning words provides a unique opportunity to study the ability to memorize names and words in a species that does not speak a language.
According to Dror, the results could have implications for understanding the evolution of human language. Indeed, memory is a fundamental component of our language. “Why is language uniquely human? To understand this, we need to understand which parts of language are present in other animals and which are not,” Dror explained.
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Not every dog is a word genius
The ability to learn the names of objects, such as toys, is not the same in every dog. In their study, the authors emphasize that only a small number are particularly “word gifted.” Therefore, little is known about the mechanisms that enable dogs to learn a large vocabulary.
However, Dror noted that dogs with this talent often had owners who spent a lot of time with them, as “The Guardian” writes. “The more you invest in your dog, the more you will reap from the relationship,” Dror stated.