Treat. Walk. Play. According to viral videos on TikTok and Instagram, pet dogs (and one sassy pig named Merlin) are expressing their demands by pressing button boards—a floor-based array of buttons labeled with dog-appropriate words—instead of barking and whimpering.
As funny and endearing as these videos are, they raise a scientific question: Do dogs who press button boards actually understand what they’re doing and use them to communicate specific needs?
According to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, they do.
Researchers from the University of California and the University of Valencia in Spain asked the owners of 152 pet dogs to record the animals’ button presses using a custom-built smartphone application, resulting in over 190,000 data points.
For button presses to qualify as a meaningful form of canine communication, the researchers had to rule out several common criticisms of “talking” dogs—namely, that their presses were either random or a result of being led by the owner’s inadvertent body language (a confounding factor dubbed the Clever Hans effect) or by their positive reinforcement.
Their analysis revealed that, at the population level, the dogs’ button-presses were not random nor accidental, and that specific two-button combinations were pressed more often than could be explained by chance. “We also find that dogs’ presses are not perfectly predicted by their owners’, suggesting that dogs’ presses are not merely repetitions of human presses, therefore suggesting that dog soundboard use is deliberate.”
Though inspired by a social media trend, the study’s findings represent an intriguing step toward understanding animal-to-human communication. In the 1970s and ’80s, animal behaviorists focused on communicating with great apes. Pre-internet stars like Koko the gorilla and Washoe the chimpanzee, both of whom were taught American Sign Language, amazed the world by seeming to sign words describing their surroundings and emotions.
Some researchers are not convinced that Koko and Washoe were capable of communicating with humans, suggesting that the apes could have been mimicking their caretakers’ words or acting in ways they knew would garner positive feedback, or the caretakers themselves might have been reading too much in the responses of their test subjects. The field of study remains controversial, simply because there aren’t enough apes in the world to produce a sufficient body of data from which to draw reliable conclusions.
But now, thanks in part to TikTok, we’re getting a bit closer to understanding what dogs might be trying to say.
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