It has become a hot button topic among dog lovers: can humans and dogs communicate with each other using a sound board? Now researchers say they have taken the first steps to find out, revealing that dogs trained to use such devices respond to the pre-recorded words just as they do to spoken words.
“Here we actually show it [dogs] pay attention to the [soundboard] words and they produce appropriate behavior independent of environmental cues and who produces the word,” says Prof. Federico Rossano, from the University of California San Diego, who led the research.
“While this study is certainly not surprising, it is a necessary first step,” he added.
Recording of push-button soundboards has boomed in recent years, with social media awash with videos of dogs like Bunny use the equipment. But debate has raged over whether such dogs really respond to sound from the device, or simply respond to cues based on their owners’ behavior or body language.
Writing in the journal Plos One, Rossano and colleagues conducted two experiments involving a total of 59 dogs, all trained to use a sound board.
In the first experiment, a researcher used colored stickers to cover the buttons on a dog’s sound board that were pre-recorded for the words outside/outside, play/toys, and food/eat/dinner/hunger.
Another researcher, unaware of which button was which and unable to hear the words they produced, then pressed one of these buttons, and the dog’s behavior was recorded.
Dog owners then performed a similar experiment, but in this case they alternated between pressing one of the buttons or saying the word themselves.
The results show that the dogs were about seven times more likely to show play-related behavior after pressing the play/toy button than the average for the three buttons, with similar levels of appropriate behavior for the out/out buttons. However, they did not show any increased chance of exhibiting food-related behavior when the corresponding button was pressed.
The findings are important regardless of whether a researcher or owner pressed the buttons, and whether their owner pressed a button or spoke the same word.
The researchers are now studying whether dogs can press the right button for specific situations, work they say could not only help probe the depth of the dogs’ word understanding, but also shed light on whether such devices could be used for humans and dogs. become to communicate with each other.
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 “nobody’s fault”, noting that the main finding was that dogs at certain responded to verbal cues.
“There’s 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 were trained to push buttons played no role in the current study, while the research did not shed new light on what dogs understand when certain words are spoken.
Dr Mélissa Berthet, from the University of Zurich, said the study laid the groundwork for future research and showed – contrary to some suggestions – that the dogs were indeed responding to the sound of the buttons rather than cues from their owner.
“They really had to show it,” she said. “And now I think the community of scientists is waiting for the rest which is going to be exciting.”
