Okay, so of all the things that were tested, there was positive evidence for
all of them and I think this really just shocked a lot of people including myself,
that dogs might be possible of this type of inferential reasoning.
I think one of the interesting things going forward will be to test more dogs,
a variety of dogs,
to see is this something that's really special about border collies.
Because all of the dogs, including Chaser.
Chaser is a dog that was trained by John Pilley and
John, who's at Walford University, did an incredible job
taking Julianne Kaminsky's work and extending it even further.
Chaser was able to use the principle of exclusion and inferential reasoning to
learn over a thousand words, and showed very similar abilities.
But the interesting thing was, when John Pilley went and
got Chaser as a puppy for the purpose of this research.
He didn't somehow choose her as some special dog or try 10 or
15 dogs before he could finally identify a dog who could do this.
He literally just went and got a puppy and the first puppy that he did this with,
was incredible and turned into this dog that knows a thousand different words.
So that suggests to us that this isn't something special about Rico and Chaser.
This is probably something that lots of dogs have the ability to do.
Just like when Oreo was using gestures,
a lot of people said well do you think it's something special about your dog?
I said no, I think lots of dogs can do this, and
I imagine that's the exact same thing.
Rico and Chaser have given us a window into the minds of lots of dogs,
it's not just about them.
The neat thing is that Adam McClosey has taken this further with his colleagues.
And he's developed a game and
published on it where it's not, it's actually a cup game.
And basically, you show dogs where food is not, and they have to infer
that if it's not in this location it must be in the other location.
And that is one of the games that you can play through Dognition as a laboratory
game with your dog to see if your dog is capable of the principle of exclusion.
Now of course that's not required, but
it's fun if you wanna see what your dog can do.
So, given that we discovered this amazing thing that dogs are capable
of potentially fast mapping, people like Julian Kaminsky continue to look for
other evidence of inferential reasoning in dog.
And this is another gorgeous example where dogs show the ability to
potentially understand what somebody else could perceive visually.
And this is related of course to theory of mind.
We've talked about dogs understanding communicative intentions or
what it is you want and you're trying to communicate.
This is dogs understanding what you can and cannot see.
And in this case what happens is the dog, it wants to play fetch.
You ask it to retrieve a ball, but the trick is one of the balls is behind
an opaque occluder, which you, as the person cannot see through.