RICO

Rico (born December 1994) is a Border Collie dog who made the news after being studied by animal psychologist Juliane Kaminski from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig after his owners reported that he understood more than 200 simple words. Kaminski wrote in Science that these claims were justified: Rico retrieved an average of 37 (out of 40) items correctly. Rico could also remember items' names for four weeks after his last exposure.

Kaminski eliminated the Clever Hans effect using a strict protocol: each of the 200 items whose names Rico knew was randomly assigned to one of 20 sets of 10 items. While the owner waited with the dog in a separate room, the experimenter arranged a set of items in the experimental room and then joined the owner and the dog. Next, the experimenter instructed the owner to request that the dog bring two randomly chosen items (one after the other) from the adjacent room.

Rico's vocabulary was thus broadly comparable to that of language-trained apes, dolphins, sea lions, and parrots.

Rico also responded correctly to a new word with a single exposure, apparently using a canine equivalent of the fast mapping mechanism used by humans. Subject to the anti-Clever Hansing protocols above, a new object was placed alongside seven familiar objects. Rico was told to retrieve the new object, using a word that he had never heard before. Not only could Rico correctly retrieve the object, he also responded correctly to the name of the new object, presumably using a process of elimination.

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."

Open questions include:

• 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?
• Is Rico responding to the sound of the human voice or to the words being spoken?
• Can the same results be produced with nonlinguistic sounds?

It may be of interest to note that 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.

Quotes

• "This 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." - Julia Fischer

References

• Science, Vol 304, Issue 5677 (11 June 2004), pp. 1605-1606 Pdf
• Science, Vol 304, Issue 5677 (11 June 2004), pp. 1682-1683 Pdf

External links

• Genome News Network article and photo
• CBC article
• Washington Post article and photo

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