Sometimes this blog stays true to its name – a few days (well, almost a week) ago a study based on a language development test found that the mental abilities of dogs on average were comparable to 2-year-old human children (and probably some adults too, when you think about it). Basically the test tells us that average dogs can learn about 165 words, which is similar to the performance of humans at age 2. Learning words is maybe not everything in figuring out puzzles’n’stuff, so maybe “mental abilities of a 2-year-old kid” is stretching it a bit.
A more interesting factor is how breed matters for dogs: top dog breeds can learn up to 250 words, and there is even a ranking list of the smartest/dumbest breeds compiled! This is probably related to a study published in 2004 in Science, where a border collie Rico learned the labels of 200 items, and border collies rank #1 on the “smartest dogs” list. However, as dog expert Stanley Coren puts it, some of the “dumber” breeds are usually older breeds that were bred for specific purposes (like hunting), and usually there are costs to all benefits, so being good in one thing (words) might mean having to do worse in some other thing (hunting, for example). Traits seem to follow Newton’s Third Law; for every reaction there’s an equal and opposite reaction.
Ok, that’s maybe stretching it a bit again but I like the idea – all kinds of people/dogs are needed to provide variation, and no individual can excel at everything 🙂
Further reading:
Live Science (8.8.2009) – Dogs as Smart as 2-year-old Kids:
http://www.livescience.com/animals/090808-smart-dogs.html
Stanley Coren’s blog (Canine Corner):
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner
Science (2004) – Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for “Fast Mapping”:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/304/5677/1682