Brain & Cognition
The Living Room With a Thousand Words
To Chaser, it was a library.
Snoot · a storybook of dogs
A thousand toys scattered across a living-room floor do not look like a vocabulary.
They look like chaos.
But ask Chaser for “Uncle Fuzz,” “Blue,” or “Fluff,” and the Border Collie searches the heaps until she brings back the named object. Over three years of daily work, she learned 1,022 names. She could keep an object's name separate from instructions such as take, paw, or nose, and understand broader labels for groups of toys.
Most dogs do not build a collection of names this way, even with practice. A small number of gifted word learners acquire them with startling speed.
To everyone else, the room was full of toys.
To Chaser, it was a library.
The record, named
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