Federico Rossano

One other thing that they often ask about is for scratches to be scratched.

And I think, you know, that, again, makes sense.

You're a dog, so why not?

Right.

So the comparison to human toddlers is more in terms of like how many buttons they seem to be using and the fact that they seem to combine some of them.

So when a child reaches about 50 words, they start combining them into two word sentences and

And these dogs, there's at least a few hundreds that combine buttons in two or three buttons in a sequence.

Now, of course, some of them have been trained like that so that you produce this sequence and you get some kind of reward.

And so that's not really impressive.

But some of them seem to be doing it in novel ways.

And of course, we need to investigate whether that reveals more about cognitive intelligence than anything else.

Now, in terms of the limits, of course, it's like there are some dogs that have 100, 150 buttons, which, by the way, seems crazy.

But we know scientists have known for many years that there are dogs that can learn up to a thousand words and that most dogs actually understand between.

80 and 100 words in general from your vocabulary when you talk to them.

So it's not unreasonable for them to be able to associate words with some meaning.

And of course, if you think about it, you just associate the pushing of this button with something that happens in the world.

So that's not that crazy.

But the reality is most dogs...

struggle to learn buttons or at least you they learn maybe three or four buttons and that's about it uh the the median is nine buttons in our study we have ten thousand dogs so clearly there's like five thousand have less than nine buttons but as i said there's a few more you know i guess in short though if my dog presses a button to say he loves me or she loves me do they really understand that

I think they understand it as much as if your two-year-old tells you I love you, you know, do they really understand that?