It’s a hotly debated topic among dog lovers: Can humans and dogs communicate with each other using a soundboard? Researchers have now taken the first steps to find out. They have found that dogs trained to use such devices respond to the recorded words in the same way as they do to spoken words.
“Here we show that (dogs) actually pay attention to the (resonance) words and show corresponding behaviors, regardless of environmental stimuli and who produces the word,” said Prof. Federico Rossano of the University of California, San Diego, who led the research.
“While this study is certainly not groundbreaking, it is a necessary first step,” he added.
The use of push-button soundboards has increased dramatically in recent years, with social media awash with videos of dogs like Bunny using the device. However, there is debate over whether these dogs are truly responding to the sound of the device or simply to signals based on their owners’ behavior or body language.
In the journal Plos One, Rossano and colleagues report how they conducted two experiments with a total of 59 dogs, all of which had been trained to use a soundboard.
In the first experiment, a researcher covered the keys on a dog’s soundboard with colored stickers. The keys had the words “outside/outdoors,” “play/toy,” and “food/eat/dinner/hungry” written on them.
Another researcher, who did not know which button was which and could not hear the words they produced, then pressed one of those buttons and the dog’s behavior was recorded.
Dog owners then conducted a similar experiment, but this time varying between pressing one of the buttons and saying the word itself.
The results show that the dogs were approximately seven times more likely to exhibit play-related behavior after pressing the play/toy button than on average across the three buttons, with appropriate behavior similarly high for the “out”/”outside” buttons. However, they were not more likely to exhibit food-related behavior when the appropriate button was pressed.
Crucially, the results were valid regardless of whether a researcher or an owner pressed the keys and whether the owner pressed a key or said the same word.
The researchers are currently investigating whether dogs can press the right button in certain situations. According to them, this work could not only help to improve dogs’ understanding of words, but also provide information about whether such devices can be used for communication between humans and dogs.
Prof. Clive Wynne, director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the work, described the new study as “bland” and pointed out that the most important finding was that dogs responded to certain verbal cues.
“This is not particularly remarkable,” he said, adding that the team only examined responses to three familiar words – and the dogs were successful at only two of them.
Wynne said the fact that the dogs were trained to press buttons did not play a role in the current study, and the research did not provide any new insights into what dogs understood when certain words were spoken.
Dr. Mélissa Berthet of the University of Zurich said the study laid the foundation for future research and showed – contrary to some speculation – that the dogs actually responded to the sound of the buttons and not to signals from their owner.
“They had to show that,” she said. “And now I think the scientific community is waiting for the rest, which will be exciting.”
