Implications
Nature columnist Paul Bloom of Yale University, a scientist specializing in children's acquisition of semantics and language, commented on the study, saying that "for psychologists, dogs may be the new chimpanzees." He also had reservations, pointing out that children learn new words in many ways, while Rico learns only through rewards for successfully fetching an object. "If any child learned words the way Rico did, the parents would run screaming to the nearest neurologist."
Border collies are bred to respond in clever ways to a combination of human vocal commands and whistles, which makes them excellent sheep dogs. Whether Rico's clever responses equate to any kind of language comprehension or even whether they demonstrate any language skill (apart from distinguishing the difference among sounds) is at best unclear.
There are several open questions regarding Rico's abilities that could serve to further illuminate the nature of canine intelligence:
- Can Rico demonstrate understanding of a word other than by fetching an object?
- Could Rico be told not to fetch a specific object (akin to telling a human child "don't touch!")?
- Can Rico learn a word for any object that is not small and fetchable?
- Can the same results be produced with nonlinguistic sounds?
According to Julia Fischer,
" tells us he can do simple logic . . . It's like he's saying to himself, 'I know the others have names, so this new word cannot refer to my familiar toys. It must refer to this new thing.' Or it goes the other way around, and he's thinking, 'I've never seen this one before, so this must be it.' He's actually thinking."
Read more about this topic: Rico (dog)
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