How do soundboard-trained dogs respond to human button presses? An investigation into word comprehension

by Amalia P. M. Bastos, Ashley Evenson, Patrick M. Wood, Zachary N. Houghton, Lucas Naranjo, Gabriella E. Smith, Alexandria Cairo-Evans, Lisa Korpos, Jack Terwilliger, Sarita Raghunath, Cassandra Paul, Hairou Hou, Federico Rossano

Past research on interspecies communication has shown that animals can be trained to use Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) devices, such as soundboards, to make simple requests of their caretakers. The recent uptake in AIC devices by hundreds of pet owners around the world offers a novel opportunity to investigate whether AIC is possible with owner-trained family dogs. To answer this question, we carried out two studies to test pet dogs’ ability to recognise and respond appropriately to food-related, play-related, and outside-related words on their soundboards. One study was conducted by researchers, and the other by citizen scientists who followed the same procedure. Further, we investigated whether these behaviours depended on the identity of the person presenting the word (unfamiliar person or dog’s owner) and the mode of its presentation (spoken or produced by a pressed button). We find that dogs produced contextually appropriate behaviours for both play-related and outside-related words regardless of the identity of the person producing them and the mode in which they were produced. Therefore, pet dogs can be successfully taught by their owners to associate words recorded onto soundboard buttons to their outcomes in the real world, and they respond appropriately to these words even when they are presented in the absence of any other cues, such as the owner’s body language.