With no prior training, dogs can infer how similar types of toys work, even when they don’t look alike

As infants, humans naturally learn new words and their associations—like the fact that forks are related to bowls because both are used to consume food. In a study publishing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on September 18, a team of animal behavior experts demonstrate that dogs can categorize objects by function, too. In a series of playful interactions with their owners, a group of Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs were able to distinguish between toys used for tugging versus fetching, even when the toys in question didn’t share any obvious physical similarities—and then could remember those categorizations for long periods of time, all with no prior training. 

“We discovered that these Gifted Word Learner dogs can extend labels to items that have the same function or that are used in the same way,” says author Claudia Fugazza (@geniusdogchallenge) of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. It’s like a person calling both a traditional hammer and a rock by the same name, says Fugazza. 

“The rock and the hammer look physically different, but they can be used for the same function,” she says. “So now it turns out that these dogs can do the same.” 

The studies took place in the dogs’ natural home environments with their human owners. At the beginning, the dogs spent time getting familiar with verbal labels for two functional groups of objects: pull and fetch. Their owners used these words with specific toys and played with them accordingly even though the toys didn’t share any similar physical features. 

Next, the dogs were tested to see if they had learned to connect the functional labels to the correct group of toys before playing with more novel toys in the two distinct categories. However, this time, their owners didn’t use the “pull” and “fetch” labels for the dogs.  

The team found that the dogs were able to extend the functional labels they’d learned previously to the new toys based on their experience playing with them. In the final test, the dogs showed that they could successfully apply the verbal labels to the toys by either pulling or fetching accordingly, even when their owners hadn’t named them. 

“For these new toys, they’ve never heard the name, but they have played either pull or fetch, and so the dog has to choose which toy was used to play which game,” Fugazza says. “This was done in a natural setup, with no extensive training. It's just owners playing for a week with the toys. So, it’s a natural type of interaction.” 

The authors note that the dogs’ ability to connect verbal labels to objects based on their functional classifications and apart from the toys’ physical attributes suggests that they form a mental representation of the objects based on their experience with their functions, which they can later recall. These findings provide insight into the evolution of basic skills related to language and their relationship to other cognitive abilities, including memory, the researchers say. 

More research is needed to understand the scope and flexibility of dogs’ language categorization abilities. The researchers suggest future studies to explore whether dogs that don’t learn object labels may nevertheless have an ability to classify objects based on their functions. 

“We have shown that dogs learn object labels really fast, and they remember them for a long period, even without rehearsing,” Fugazza says. “And I think the way they extend labels also beyond perceptual similarities gives an idea of the breadth of what these labels could be for dogs.” 

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This work was supported by National Brain Research Program NAP 3.0 of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, and TRIXIE. 

Current Biology, Fugazza et al. “Dogs extend verbal labels for functional classification of objects” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)01079-6 

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.   

Author contact(s): 
Claudia Fugazza 
Loránd University 
Claudia.happydog@gmail.com 

Media contact(s): 
Sara Böhm 
sara.bohm91@gmail.com