Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  Chaser and I begin with a fast-paced five minutes of play with several named toys to rehearse her language learning. I randomly ask her to fetch, shake, catch, toss, take in her mouth, nose, paw, and herd one toy after another. And I kick and throw the ball for her to capture as it ricochets around the room.

  From there we work on new or recent learning. We alternate brief trials in the current lesson with brief periods of play. The play provides more opportunities to rehearse her language learning as she chases and gathers her toys while I verbalize what she is doing or what I want her to do next. After we’ve worked on the current language task for ten to fifteen minutes, we follow the same fast-paced rhythm as we move on to match-to-sample and imitation learning.

  Play with Chaser’s toys continues to enhance the value of the toys and the language tasks and games involving them. What is more important is that the play refreshes us both, that it continues to confirm and deepen our relationship as fellow creatures. That is really what enables her language learning to progress.

  We know that the progress of toddlers’ language learning depends on their language-based relationships with parents, siblings, and others. Toddlers whose parents speak to them on all sorts of topics throughout the day advance much faster and farther in language learning than toddlers whose parents rarely speak to them except to scold them or tell them to do something. Somehow, the mystery of what happens in children’s minds when they first acquire a language and the relationships they have with other people are interdependent.

  As children acquire language, they also acquire a sense of themselves as social beings. As they learn the meaning of words, they also learn that other people have unique points of view, thoughts, and feelings. As they develop an implicit understanding of grammar, they also develop the ability to infer how cues such as pointing, facial expression, and tone of voice indicate the meaning of words. No one knows precisely how these things reinforce each other, but language is inherently a social activity.

  If I am less than enthusiastic in a language trial or the play following it, Chaser’s engagement fades. She delights in pleasing me, and if my enthusiasm flags, she naturally thinks of something she’s sure we’ll enjoy. That’s when she entices me to play with a ball or a Frisbee. In the end it is always the quality of our relationship that determines the quality of the learning.

  We repeat the same language, match-to-sample, and imitation learning that we do at Wofford in the rest of the day’s training sessions at home. But our early-morning visits to Wofford stand out for both of us because of the opportunities to engage with new and old friends among Wofford students, faculty, staff, and administrators.

  One day we were working on a language task when half the women’s varsity soccer team came by with their coach. Within seconds Chaser was getting belly rubs and other pets from the players. Smiling at this scene, the coach asked if we could do a brief demonstration.

  I called Chaser to my side and told her, “Chaser, watch ball. Watch ball.” I rolled a racquetball onto the floor and said, “Go out, Chase. Go out, go out.” She raced to circle around behind the ball.

  “Chaser, come by. Come by, come by.” She wheeled clockwise around the ball.

  “Way to me, way to me.” She wheeled counterclockwise around the ball.

  “Walk up, walk up.” She approached the ball.

  “Drop.” She instantly went to her belly.

  “One, two, three, take!” She sprang forward and grabbed the ball in her mouth.

  “That’ll do.” She ran to me with the ball.

  “Good girl! Good dog!” I said, stroking her side.

  The players crowded around us, and I stepped back to allow Chaser to wiggle and wag and flop on the floor for their pets, embraces, and cooing words. She was never sharper than in performing for this impromptu admiring audience, and she was in heaven with their praise and attention.

  Unpredictable rewards for behavior motivate more powerfully than predictable ones. When Chaser and I went back to our language training, she was extra sharp at that too, because it was so closely associated in her mind with the team’s arrival and her interaction with them.

  Moments of discovery in language learning don’t seem to loom up in Chaser’s conscious mind the same way as discovering how to connect with new people. But like toddlers unconsciously understanding words as symbols, Chaser experiences unpredictable breakthroughs in language learning too. These are moments when the challenge of a language puzzle turns into a confident prelude to play.

  The puzzle we were working through after the APA was understanding a sentence with three elements of grammar. I was excited, as always, to help Chaser experience more of the mystery of language acquisition, even if it was only a rudimentary language.

  My training method continued to focus on what the eminent animal scientist John Staddon calls creative learning rather than rote learning. In rote learning the goal is to teach a predetermined response. In creative learning the goal is to stimulate and support spontaneous responses to solve a challenge.

  Shepherds train Border collies using creative learning. Once Border collies have learned a few basic obedience and herding commands, they are literally turned loose with the sheep. Their knowledge of how to herd sheep then develops as they spontaneously behave in instinctual ways and the shepherd positively or negatively reinforces their choices of what to do.

  As I mentioned in chapter 7, John Staddon has likened the way a wise teacher encourages a student’s individual interests in learning to the way the early-nineteenth-century Scottish “shepherd poet” James Hogg trained his Border collie Sirrah. Hogg described this training as putting Sirrah into situations in which “he would try everywhere . . . till he found out what I wanted him to do.” In the process Sirrah demonstrated “a great share of reasoning.”

  The result of Hogg’s open-ended training was that Sirrah was later able to gather and safeguard seven hundred lambs that were scattered from their pens during a storm in the middle of the night, with no assistance or direction from Hogg or anyone else.

  Staddon sums up creative learning for animals by saying that “it means creating an environment in which the animal’s natural propensities (which, in an intelligent animal, go far beyond reflex response) can flower to their full extent.” Once we’ve created a positive way for an intelligent animal to tackle a challenging problem, we can let a natural creative learning process occur. Our job is to watch for the spontaneous problem-solving efforts that have the most promise, and reinforce them positively. As the educator Maria Montessori put it, “Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.”

  That is what I’ve tried to do with Chaser. I’ve presented her with challenges just outside her grasp and encouraged her spontaneous efforts to solve them. Along the way I’ve seen her acquire greater and greater implicit understanding of words, making it possible to present her with even tougher challenges. Learning truly builds on learning.

  Chaser and I started working on sentences with three elements of grammar late in 2010. As I mentioned, some researchers question whether a dog’s correct responses to two-word sentences, such as “fetch sock,” demonstrate combinatorial understanding of two elements of grammar, a verb and a direct object, or understanding of a single element, a “fetch-the-sock” fusion. Chaser’s take-nose-paw tests demonstrated her independent understanding of verbs and direct objects. She was ready to tackle a third element of grammar, an indirect object.

  The question was how to add the indirect object. What action should I ask her to perform, and how should I structure the sentence to communicate that?

  Early in her first year of life, Chaser learned that to means “go to” or “take to.” When Chaser already had an object in her mouth, Sally and I frequently told her, “To Pop-Pop,” “To Nanny,” “To living room,” “To front porch,” and so on. Likewise, early in her training, Chaser learned that take meant “hold the designated object in your mouth,” independent of any future act
ion with the object.

  “Take ball to Frisbee” did not work well, however, because of Chaser’s tendency to focus most intently on the last thing she hears. For Border collies the shepherd’s last word or phrase contains the essence of the command. With “take ball to Frisbee” she tended to pick up the Frisbee rather than the ball.

  Not long before the address and demonstrations at the APA, it occurred to me that the two halves of the sentence might be clearer for Chaser, and easy enough for me to say, with a structure of “to Frisbee take ball.” The sequence of grammatical elements then became prepositional object, verb, direct object.

  This sentence structure made the last thing I said the first thing Chaser needed, and wanted, to do: pick up an object in her mouth. The structure also followed the format of herding commands, in which the last words a dog hears represent what he or she has to do next.

  The first times I told Chaser “to Frisbee take ball” and “to ball take Frisbee,” with only those two objects on the floor, there seemed to be less hesitation in her responses. But I wasn’t sure if the difference was real. Over the following few days, however, it was obvious that her confidence was increasing.

  Alliston told me, “You’re using the same syntax structure as in Spanish.” He is fluent in the language from his years of teaching in Mexico. It tickled me that I had stumbled onto a sentence format used in a real human language.

  Finding that a Spanish-style sentence clicked for Chaser was a neat aha moment for both of us. The experiment could proceed and the play could continue.

  I selected a hundred of Chaser’s 1,022 named toys as a training group. Working with random pairs of toys, I frequently reversed the roles—prepositional object and direct object—that two toys had. I also reversed their positions on the floor, sometimes putting the direct object on the right and sometimes on the left.

  At first I pointed to each toy as I spoke its name. Over time I phased out the pointing. I also complicated the task by putting two possible prepositional objects and two possible direct objects on the floor. Later I put the two prepositional objects and the two direct objects in different rooms.

  An early training trial began with two toys five to ten feet apart on the floor. With Chaser close in front of me and both of us facing the toys, I said, for example, “Chaser! To Sugar take Decoy.” She had to pick up Decoy in her mouth, carry and drop it near Sugar, and then take Sugar in her mouth. Completing the trial brought Chaser praise and play with Sugar.

  If Chaser headed toward the wrong object or got hung up in indecision at any point, I recalled her without correction and repeated, “To Sugar take Decoy” or whatever the initial instruction was. As always I wanted Chaser to start off with errorless learning and gain confidence with each success.

  As we worked on “to Sugar take Decoy” and “to Decoy take Sugar” type sentences, there was less need to recall Chaser and repeat the instructions. If she hesitated, I said, “Do it, girl. Do it!” Enthusiastic encouragement usually emboldened her to make a choice, and usually it was the right one. If she kept hesitating I recalled her without correction and gave her the “to A take B” instruction again. Her comfort with that gave me the impression that hesitating became her way of saying, “Could you please repeat that sentence?”

  It was fascinating to see Chaser try various strategies for responding to sentences like “to Santie Claus take Flipflopper” and “to Flipflopper take Santie Claus.” After being reinforced for picking the toy on the right a few times in a row, for example, Chaser apparently formed the hypothesis that I always wanted the toy on that side. Gradually she realized that this strategy was unreliable.

  It also emerged that how I said “to A take B” mattered quite a lot to Chaser’s comprehension. She was best able to process the words and hold them in working memory when I slowly but emphatically said, “to A, take B,” with a definite pause between “to A” and “take B” and rising energy as I completed the sentence. The more enthusiastic and encouraging I made “take B” sound, the better.

  Early in 2012 the journal Learning and Motivation invited Alliston and me to submit a paper on Chaser for a special 2013 issue on animal learning. Alliston didn’t have time, but he suggested I do it on my own. I decided to report my three-elements-of-grammar experiments, assuming the results were statistically significant.

  In addition to my training-and-play sessions with Chaser, Sally and I incorporated three-elements-of-grammar sentences into our interactions with her, including our nighttime routine. She plays and snuggles on the bed with us, lying in between Sally and me and being petted by both of us, until we say, “That’s enough, Chase.” At that point she curls up on the end of the bed for a while, before moving off to the living room couch and other favored sleeping spots. “To Nanny, take Sugar,” “to Pop-Pop, take Decoy,” and “to bedroom, take Crawdad” closed the day’s training at home, as “to ball, take Frisbee” and “to Frisbee, take ball” trials began it at Wofford.

  By fall 2012, Chaser became virtually perfect in responding to three-elements-of-grammar sentences in informal trials and play with Sally and me. She could complete the reversal trial (to B, take A) even if it did not follow the initial trial (to A, take B) until after intervening trials with other object pairs. It was another instance of relationships powering Chaser’s learning.

  Seeing Chaser’s accuracy exceed 90 percent in informal trials and play convinced me that she was ready to work with other testers in formal trials under double-blind conditions. The double-blind tests would provide results for the paper for Learning and Motivation.

  The tests were blind in that the testers, Wofford student volunteers furnished with instruction sheets with the commands for each trial, did not know the names of Chaser’s toys. So there was no chance of Clever Hans cues. The tests were double blind in that other students, who were not present during the tests, evaluated audio-video recordings of them. During the tests, I operated a camcorder to capture audio and video.

  We did the double-blind tests in two experimental scenarios with random pairings, varied placement of toys, and initial and reversal trials for each pairing. In experiment 1, using toys from the training group, Chaser got twenty-five of thirty-two right, or 78 percent. In experiment 2, using toys we had not used in training the sentences, she got eighteen of twenty-four right, or 75 percent. In both cases the probability that her correct answers resulted purely from chance was less than one in a thousand. This showed that her understanding of this kind of sentence could not be attributed to chance factors.

  When Alliston watched the video of experiment 2, he noticed that Chaser looked briefly at the prepositional object and the direct object as she heard their names, and then went straight to the direct object. This suggested that Chaser’s brain might not be processing a mental image of the direct object into working memory, because she did not take her eyes off it after hearing its name.

  To test this possibility, I devised experiment 3 using six random object pairs. For each pair there was an initial trial and a reversal trial, with two possible indirect objects an inch apart on the living room floor and two possible direct objects an inch apart on a pillow at the head of Sally’s and my bed.

  Standing in front of Chaser as she lay on the foot of the bed facing me, so that she could not see the toys on the pillow, I gave her the “to A, take B” command. When she stood up and turned around to select one of the direct objects, I could not give her a visual cue because the objects were so close together. Having made her choice of a direct object, Chaser raced with it into the living room and raced back with her choice of a prepositional object, which we played with before starting the next trial.

  Chaser got all the trials in experiment 3 correct, with a less than one in a million probability that her choices resulted from random chance. Together with the first two experiments, this indicates that her brain does process a mental image of the direct object into working memory when she hears its name.

  The three experime
nts also demonstrate both that Chaser securely lodged the names of all the toys and the meanings of “to” and “take” into long-term memory, and that she successfully held two toy names, “to,” and “take” in short-term working memory while she made a semantic judgment about which toy to pick up first. The results provide strong evidence that Chaser can understand the syntax and semantics of sentences with three elements of grammar. And in showing that she can combine two cognitive abilities, long-term memory and working memory, to solve language tasks, the results raise the bar in terms of expectations for a dog’s language learning.

  Chaser’s results suggest the possibility that she experiences a “phonological loop” when she completes “to A, take B” tasks. A phonological loop occurs when people repeat the directions for a task silently in their heads until the task is done. Researchers with access to brain scanning equipment might track a canine phonological loop by comparing activity patterns in a dog’s brain to those in human brains when people silently repeat a sentence to themselves.

  The dolphins Phoenix and Akeakamai respectively got 62.3 percent and 56 percent of their three elements of grammar sentences correct. In her equivalent trials Chaser got 78 percent and 75 percent correct. Taken together, these results indicate that an animal’s brain can in some way operate like a language-learning toddler’s brain and display implicit understanding of rudimentary grammar.

  No one teaches little children the rules of grammar—they may never learn the formal rules of grammar—but somehow they acquire an implicit understanding of it. From the first babbling to the first sentences, from “Mama” and “Dada” to “More juice” to “I love you” to “Tell me a story,” they listen and respond in ways that show they are gaining a sense of how words go together to create sentences (syntax) and how the same words can have different meanings depending on their order and other relationships (semantics). “Mama, breakfast” means something different from “Mama’s breakfast,” and so on.