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Humans can communicate with dogs using soundboards, study suggests (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to c/interestingshare@lemmy.zip

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Study described as ‘necessary first step’ in discovering whether dogs and humans can use push-button devices to communicate

Study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307189

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[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The title is misleading.

Prof Clive Wynne, the director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the work, described the new study as a “nothing burger”, noting that the main finding was that dogs responded to certain verbal cues.

“There is nothing remarkable about that,” he said, adding that the team only studied responses to three familiar words – and the dogs were only successful on two of them.

Wynne said the fact that the dogs had been trained to press buttons played no role in the current study, while the research did not shed new light on what dogs understood when certain words were spoken.

So we'll need to wait for the rest of the research to conclude anything.

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I disagree. It explicitly says suggest, not shows. And the study does suggest the possibility of that, but it also notes that further studies are needed to confirm initial findings.

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The study doesn't suggest anything specific about soundboards. It only focuses on dogs' responses to prerecorded words vs spoken commands which shouldn't surprise anyone as there's no new ground being covered. The only news here is that scientists are barely starting into this branch of research, which this article should've focused on instead of this trivial study.

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I added the link to the study in the post body, since the article didn't link to it. Again, this particular study didn't provide any evidence that it's possible, but they raised the possibly and backed it with non-controlled citizen data. Hence, a need for a controlled study to confirm that possibility.

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

Thanks for the link!

In order to determine whether dogs’ performance at word comprehension is reflected in their button pressing, carefully controlled future studies must investigate whether dogs can spontaneously produce contextually appropriate button presses in experimentally induced situations [to] establish the extent to which AIC devices can be used for two-way interspecies communication

Now that would be interesting.