ArticleScientific reports2021
Word learning dogs (Canis familiaris) provide an animal model for studying exceptional performance.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Popperian Dogs-Practical Rationality and Inferential Reasoning in Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- Toy exploration in gifted word learner dogs and typical dogs.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- What makes a dog a label-learner: individual cognitive differences underlying label-learning abilities in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris).Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Implicit knowledge of words in dogs.Learning & behavior · 2025Article
- Let's talk about "talking" dogs! Reviewing the science behind a bold idea.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Do dogs understand?-Contrasting anecdotal reports, neuroimaging, and behavioural evidence on language comprehension.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Dogs as a model to study the emergence of concept manipulation skills for language-readiness.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Sound quality impacts dogs' ability to recognize and respond to playback words.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Soundboard-trained dogs produce non-accidental, non-random and non-imitative two-button combinations.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Shape and texture biases in dogs' generalization of trained objects.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Rapid formation of picture-word association in cats.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Dogs with a vocabulary of object labels retain them for at least 2 years.Biology letters · 2024Article
- You talkin' to me? Functional breed selection may have fundamentally influenced dogs' sensitivity to human verbal communicative cues.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Cognitive and sensory capacity each contribute to the canine spatial bias.Ethology : formerly Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie · 2024Article
- How do soundboard-trained dogs respond to human button presses? An investigation into word comprehension.PloS one · 2024Article
- A citizen science model turns anecdotes into evidence by revealing similar characteristics among Gifted Word Learner dogs.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Investigating responses to object-labels in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris).Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Multisensory mental representation of objects in typical and Gifted Word Learner dogs.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- A comparison of personality traits of gifted word learner and typical border collies.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- An exploratory analysis of head-tilting in dogs.Animal cognition · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Exceptional performance is present in various human activities but its origins are debated and challenging to study. We report evidence of exceptional performance and qualitative variation in learning object-names in dogs. 34 naïve family dogs and 6 knowledgeable individuals that knew multiple toy names, found in 2 years of search around the Globe, were exposed to 3 months of training to learn two novel toy-names and were tested in two-way choice tests. Only 1 naïve and all 6 knowledgeable dogs passed the tests. Additionally, only these dogs learned at least 10 new toy names over the 3 months, showing qualitative variation in this capacity. Although previous object-name knowledge could provide an explanation for the superior performance of the knowledgeable dogs, their rarity and the absence of previous training of this skill point to exceptional giftedness in these individuals, providing the basis to establish dogs as a model-species for studying talent.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.