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January 20, 2006

Strange But True!

Q. Could a dog learn to pick a novel object out of a group of familiar ones — without ever having seen the object or being taught its name before?

A. The German border collie Rico, to the amazement of everyone, was able to identify (go and fetch from another room) more than 200 different toys, with surprising accuracy — a "vocabulary" size rivaling that of a 3-year-old child. More, Rico was able to "fast map," or apply the process of elimination when confronted with several toys he already knew plus an object he had never seen before. When asked to fetch the new object by its "new" name, Rico could do so most of the time, and often recalled the new word a month later. A doggone brainy dog.


 
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