Chapter 1: Can dogs really communicate their feelings with buttons?
We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper Your dog looks at you in the eyes, chooses one button from a bunch you've laid out on the floor that says love, and suddenly you're melting. But is that affection or just your dog manipulating you? What is the actual science behind dogs talking?
Are pooches actually using language or are we just falling for emotional manipulation?
Chapter 2: What is the science behind dogs using buttons to communicate?
What is the story here? We're here with someone who researches this. His name is Federico Rossano, and he's a cognitive sciences professor at UC San Diego. Federico, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So these buttons that get laid out on the ground, most people have seen viral videos of dogs, quote unquote, communicating with them. Walk me through what's actually going on.
Chapter 3: How do pets learn to use communication buttons effectively?
Is it a product? Can I buy it? How common is it for people to have?
Yeah, so it's apparently a quite popular product. I don't sell them. I don't make them. I have no affiliation with any company that produces them. But
basically is a button that you can record your voice on for example you can say outside or i love you or bye and when it's pressed it just reproduces that sound so you could use it for fun with friends with a kid but it has now in the last few years been used with dogs and cats in people's homes and people have been training their pets to basically use these devices to
let them know when they want to go outside when they want food or when they're upset about something
I'm struck by people immediately believing that when their pets use these buttons and use them correctly, that they're somehow speaking with them, that they understand language. My brother's dog, when he taps on the glass door of his back of his house, that just means I want to go outside to go to the bathroom.
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Chapter 4: What are the limitations of dog communication through buttons?
When my cat meows at me near his cat bowl, that means he wants to eat. How is pressing a button to achieve that goal kind of any different than just basic communication?
No, I mean, absolutely. It's learned in the same way. I guess the difference is, you know, they can scratch the door and you know they want to go outside, but you don't know why they want to go outside.
Chapter 5: Can dogs express complex emotions like love with buttons?
Do they need to go poo? Do they need to, did they hear something they want to chase? Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. I think the difference is there might be for some people, it might be beneficial to know, for example, when you're hungry, when you're thirsty, when you want to play, when you have any other kind of issue. Some dogs communicate about being in pain.
And I think, again, you might imagine that they're sick. You might know that they have a problem, but you don't know what body part they have a problem in, right? So the idea is that it's supposed to be, and again, I'm not making them, so I'm not trying to sell it. It's supposed to be another tool to kind of gather a little more information about what's going on through their minds.
But can these pets really conceptualize language?
Chapter 6: How do dogs communicate their needs and emotions naturally?
Like can they express a complex sentence or in a complex emotion like love using these buttons? Or when you press, when the dog presses love, it just knows that it gets treats and that's how it kind of learned it.
Well, you know, my answer to this is like, when your partner says, I love you, do they mean it? It's like, you just don't know. All you get is like, they say it and then you might get a hug or you might get a kiss or something. So the reality is you never know for humans either whether they, what it really means. What you know is the behavioral response that follows, right?
And so I think part of what we're interested in is not making claims about them being able to have language because I don't believe they have language. But what I definitely believe is that they can communicate. And of course, they can try to communicate concepts at a level of granularity that might be different from what they we can make sense of when they scratch the door or when they bark.
So imagine when your dog is barking, you know there's a problem, but you don't know what it is that they want. But if they could tell you what the problem is, for example, there's a stranger outside, which usually is the Amazon delivery guy, maybe you actually know that it's not a big deal. But if there's actually somebody trying to break into your house, maybe you want to know that.
And so again, barking just tells you there's a problem. You don't know what the problem is. And if they could tell you, maybe it could be helpful.
It could, but is it possible with these buttons in your studies and your research and what people say and what videos you've seen and animals you've met? Can they do the level of like, oh, pay attention to the door because it's a mailman or pay attention to the door because a crook's breaking in? Are pets able to press the right button for that level of complexity?
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Chapter 7: What are some examples of dogs communicating about pain?
Yes, they definitely do. And they have done it. Now, we know for sure they can communicate reliably about some things that they care about and they want, obviously, like treats and toys and cuddles or whatever. We also know that they definitely produce alert signals, right? So they can tell you that there's some problem. We actually have had...
instances of dogs that have alerted that there was smoke and indeed there was a fire that was starting in the house and so there could be things that you know they could communicate about now the question is is that language right so you know they could bark and that would also tell you that there's a problem i think what we can show is that they can combine some of those patterns
in ways that are non-random. They are definitely intentional. I think we are far from being able to show that this is in any way more sophisticated than what maybe a baby can do when combining two words together.
What are some of the most novel combinations you've seen? I mean, I'm sure you can tell I'm open-minded but skeptical about this whole thing. What would be an example that would convince me that these are dogs really communicating something about their internal state, combining concepts? What would be something like a good example of that?
Well, for example, there's several instances of dogs communicating about pain.
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Chapter 8: How do dogs compare to toddlers in their communication abilities?
So for example, if a dog pushes belly out, belly out, and then 10 minutes later they vomit, maybe they were trying to tell you that there's a problem. If they tell you ear ouch, and then they have an ear infection when you go to the vet, maybe they were trying to tell you that they have a problem. So some of these combinations occur.
And then, of course, it's like communicating about pain is something that in and of itself could be beneficial for people. And in the same way, of course, there might be information about what's happening around you. Or most importantly, I think is
The fact that they can tell you when they're hungry, when they're thirsty, when they want things, when they are upset about whatever noise, for example, happening outside or heat. And dogs communicate about this in their natural ways. It's just that for most people, this might be hard to understand. Sometimes buttons can help make it a little more transparent.
now do dogs want to end up communicating to us a little bit more about poop and food than we would like to admit i feel like that's probably on their mind more than most things yes yes yes absolutely and it's funny a lot of these dogs that i'm looking at go through the what i call the poop phase which is what my little children have gone through as well where they really like to talk about poop and going outside and pooping and whatever
But in general, they love to talk about food, of course. They want treats. They want food of any kind. 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?
It's not dissimilar to me. I asked for back scratches for my girlfriend before bed. I got an itchy back. The limits though, like what are the limits for even the smartest, most well-trained dogs? You mentioned that at best these animals communicate like at a toddler level, or is that comparison to kind of human centric? In some ways they're better, in some ways they're worse.
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.
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