It has become a hot-button topic among dog lovers: can humans and dogs communicate with each other using a sounding board? Now, researchers say they have taken the first steps toward finding 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] be aware of [soundboard] words, and they produce appropriate behavior independent of environmental cues and who is producing the word,” said Professor Federico Rossano, from the University of California San Diego, who led the research.
“While this investigation is certainly not sinister, it is a necessary first step,” he added.
The proliferation of push-button soundboards has boomed in recent years, with social media filled with videos of canines like Bunny using the equipment. But debate has swirled about whether such dogs really respond to sound from the device or simply respond to cues based on their owners’ behavior or body language.
In the journal Plos One, Rossano and colleagues report how they conducted two experiments involving a total of 59 dogs, all of whom had been trained to use a sounding board.
In the first experiment, a researcher used colored stickers to cover the buttons on a dog’s vocal cords that were pre-recorded for the words out/out, play/toy, and food/eat/dinner/hungry.
A second 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 conducted a similar experiment, but in this case they varied between pressing one of the buttons or saying the word themselves.
The results reveal that the odds of the dogs exhibiting play-related behavior were about seven times greater after the play/toy button was pressed than the average of the three buttons, with similar levels of appropriate behavior for the out/out buttons. However, they showed no greater chance of showing food-related behavior when the corresponding button was pressed.
Crucially, the results held 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 investigating whether dogs can press the right button for specific situations, work they say could not only help probe the depth of canines’ word understanding, but also shed light on whether such devices could be used for humans and dogs 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 “nothing burger”, noting that the main finding was that dogs responded to certain verbal cues.
“There’s nothing remarkable about it,” he said, adding that the team only studied responses to three familiar words — and the dogs were successful on only 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 said.
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 actually responded to the sound of the buttons rather than signals from their owner.
“They really needed to show this,” she said. “And now I think the community of scientists is waiting for the rest, which is going to be exciting.”