Dog Buttons

This isn't about fastenings for canine clothes. It's about electronic buttons dogs use to communicate:

Talking Dog Buttons

The article explains the electronic sound board isn't meant to replace the natural canine modes of communication. It offers an additional way for owners to interact with their pets. How it works: "The sound boards for dogs have circular buttons with words on them, each pre-recorded to say the word when pressed." Dogs push the buttons with their noses. Regular, consistent training is required for an animal to learn the which button corresponds to which word and what the words mean. A dog will grasp the significance of "food," for instance, only if the human consistently says "food" when offering a meal. The technique consists of "basic operant conditioning," no different in principle from "training a dog to ring a bell to go outside."

Does the dog understand the words, though, or simply associate a particular stimulus (the sound of the word) with a specific object or outcome? This question arises especially with an expression such as "love you." How can the meaning of an abstract concept like that be demonstrated to an animal? It's not like opening a door in response to the sound "outside." While the dog might learn to link an affectionate action (e.g., licking) with the sound "love," it's quite a stretch to assume he or she "knows" the word's "meaning."

The world-famous Border Collie Chaser could identify over 1000 toys by name.

Chaser

Her trainer claimed she had the "ability to understand sentences involving multiple elements of grammar." But did she actually "understand" the words she recognized?

It's now known that parrots do more than "parrot" the sounds they've learned. They use words in context. The grey parrot Alex is a well-known example:

Alex the Parrot

According to his trainer, he displayed intelligence on a level with great apes and dolphins. Does that behavior imply understanding in the human sense?

In cases such as these, the crucial question is how we define "understanding."

I once read a comment about an ape who "talked" through a computer keyboard, declaring that when she typed, "Computer, please. . ." she didn't know what "please" meant. She was only pushing a button that she'd been trained to use for introducing a request. How does that differ from the way a human toddler uses "please," though? To him or her, it's probably just a vocal noise required to induce adults to listen favorably. (As some parents say, "What's the magic word?")

A traditional hard-line behaviorist (if any exist nowadays) would maintain that nobody, animal or human, "understands" anything in the popular sense of the term. All behavior ultimately arises from stimulus and response, whether on a simple or complex level. Consciousness is a meaningless epiphenomenon. Free will doesn't exist.

If, as most of us believe, consciousness and the ability to choose do exist in humans and some animals, where do we draw the line to say certain creatures do or don't possess these traits? Maybe understanding is a continuum, not a sharp binary.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Animal Facial Expressions

A study at the University of Kansas Medical Center "discovered that cats use nearly 300 distinct facial expressions to communicate with one another":

Cats' Facial Expressions

In contrast, humans have 44 different facial expressions, and I was surprised to read that dogs have only 27. Feline expressions of emotion often involve ear movements and whiskers, however, so it's not so strange that they have more "distinct" expressions than we do. I was also surprised that cats' "facial signals" play such a large part in their communications with each other. As this article points out, cats are more social than people usually assume.

Chimpanzees convey a lot of information to each other by subtle facial movements:

How Chimps Communicate with a Look

Lisa Parr, director of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, discusses how small changes in expression can communicate different emotions. Chimps were tested on how well they could distinguish and identify the significance of other chimps' facial expressions. Studying these behaviors in chimpanzees may contribute to better understanding of human nonverbal communication.

Dogs may have developed some types of facial expressions specifically to communicate with us:

How Dog Expressions Evolved

Of course, as this article mentions, a lot of canine communication occurs through body language. Maybe that's why they haven't evolved as many variations on facial expressions as we have. Also, scent plays a vital role in dogs' experiences of the world, a sensory dimension we almost entirely lack compared to canines.

Quora features questions about why animals of the same species tend to look so much "alike," while human beings have distinct individual appearances. Some answers explain, in addition to the human-centered bias that causes us to make finer distinctions among members of our own species, that many animals have less variation in facial appearance than we do because they rely on other senses such as smell to recognize each other.

If intelligent Martians existed, we might think they all look alike, as the narrator of Heinlein's DOUBLE STAR does at the beginning of the novel. On the other hand, the Martians would probably have trouble telling Earth people apart.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Communicating with Pets

Netflix has a new series called THE HIDDEN LIVES OF PETS. Although it sounds as if it should reveal what our pets do when we're not watching, it actually deals with the intelligence, sensory perceptions, etc. of domestic animals. Dogs, cats, and birds feature prominently, of course, but also such creatures as rabbits, small rodents, turtles, and even soccer-playing goldfish. The episode about communication between people and animals includes a lot of video footage about a dog named Bunny who has become famous for learning to use electronic push-buttons to "talk." This system goes way beyond the battery-operated collars that attempt to translate canine barks and body language into verbal messages (prerecorded and linked to various dog behaviors by the owner):

Petspeak Collars

Here's an article about Bunny, who became the subject of a research project at UC San Diego after she and her mistress, Alexis Devine, amassed millions of TikTok followers:

Bunny the Talking Dog

This dog communicates by pressing buttons on a floor mat, each activating a prerecorded word. As the article mentions, this system is similar to the experiments in which apes learn to select symbols on keyboards to express their wants. At the age of 15 months (in November 2020) Bunny had mastered 70 buttons, including terms such as "scritches," "outside," "play," and "ouch." More problematic words such as "more," "now," "happy," and even "why" are included. While watching the video clips on the Netflix program, I wondered whether an animal could really grasp an abstract concept such as "why." Our dog responds appropriately to quite a few words in addition to the basic commands, such as "upstairs," "downstairs," "inside," "outside," "food," "leash," and "plate." All those refer to concrete objects or actions, though.

Scientists at the Comparative Cognitive Lab "comb through" the Bunny videos rather than checking only a sample. “We want to make sure we’re not just getting cherry-picked clips.” They also watch for the possibility that the dog might be reacting to subtle cues from her human partner instead of recognizing what the buttons represent. And could she "understand" words at all in the sense we mean it? Even Bunny's owner believes she's "made an association between pressing a button and something happening" rather than learning language as we do. On the other hand, human infants start by simply associating sounds with objects, too. Fitting the words into the brain's inborn grammar template comes a little later.

The Petspeak collar and Bunny's button mat remind me of the "voder" the Venusian dragon in Robert Heinlein's BETWEEN PLANETS uses to "talk." Since the highly intelligent dragons don't have vocal organs suitable for human speech, the dragon character wears an electronic device that converts his communications into audible English sentences. It doesn't duplicate the STAR TREK universal translator, being programmed only for dragon-to-English conversion, but in the distant future something like it might be used to communicate with extraterrestrials.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt