You Can Tell Your Dog Is More Intelligent Than Most If They’re Able To Do This One Fascinating Thing
sturti | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro Dogs aren't exactly known for being brainiacs. That's more a cat's domain. But a recent study found that there's one sign your dog is more intelligent than most, and it's a pretty surprising skill.
It turns out that a lot of our dogs are doing similar mental tasks to what babies and toddlers do when they're trying to learn how to navigate the world, and it means our dogs understand us far more than we might have previously realized.
One sign your dog is intelligent is that they learn through observation.
We all know that dogs can be taught different commands like "sit," "stay," and "heel." Dog trainers say that through a combination of repetition and positive reinforcement, dogs form mental associations between certain sounds that allow them to comprehend their meaning when we're telling them what to do.
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But it's the association doing the heavy lifting, not them actually understanding human language. Right? Well, it turns out it's not quite so simple. Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary wanted to investigate whether dogs that were very skilled at learning the names of their toys might be able to learn entirely new vocabulary simply by observation and overhearing. And it turns out, the answer is yes.
The study found dogs can learn new words by eavesdropping, just like toddlers.
Eavesdropping is essential to the process of language acquisition. Babies and toddlers' little brains are sponges, and they are always listening to their environment for clues and meaning, which they use to learn how to speak. This is why they often end up saying things we can't believe they even know about. They are constantly surveilling us!
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And the Hungarian researchers found that super smart dogs do the exact same thing, and they're often even better at it than human children. To determine this, the research team looked at 10 dogs whose owners said they were particularly adept at identifying toys by name. During several minute-long play sessions over a few days, they had the owners present their dogs with entirely new toys, all with names.
Sure enough, the dogs not only caught on to the new words, but they did so with a quickness that was surprising. It took just minutes of introducing the new word for the dogs to cotton on to what it meant. That was enough for 70% of the dogs to reliably identify and retrieve the toys when their owners identified them by name.
The dogs were also able to acquire the new words even if they only overheard them.
Sure, that's impressive, but could the dogs do this even when their owner wasn't directly teaching them? Yep! The researchers repeated the experiment in different environments, including ones in which the dogs were not spoken to directly and could not even see the toy.
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In one, the owners sat together and talked to each other about a new toy while passing it between them. Their dogs were in the room, but locked behind a gate and not allowed to interact with them in any way. The owners weren't even allowed to make eye contact with the dogs.
That experiment yielded roughly the same results: About 70% of the dogs were able to reliably identify and retrieve the toy, having only overheard it being discussed, just like little kids. But kids also use social cues to decipher language. Can dogs do the same?
Once again, the answer is yes: Researchers replicated the experiment once again with owners discussing the new toys with the toys themselves hidden out of view. Sure enough, the dogs caught on just as quickly, and most of them were found to have retained their new vocabulary two weeks later.
Shany Dror, an animal trainer who worked on the study, told CNN that this not only indicates the surprising extent to which dogs are "able to understand our human interactions," but could also reveal something fascinating about human speech itself: The cognitive and social skills we humans acquire by observation probably “evolved before language, and that’s why dogs can also do it." Man's best friend, indeed.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
