Is Fido smarter than the labcoats?

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The headline says, "Fido Found to Be Wiz with Words." (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=00001A09-98C2-10C8-98C283414B7F0105)

A dog in Germany is purported to have a 200-word vocabulary, and can fetch specific objects accurately with only verbal commands.Rico, the border collie, was taught to retrieve different objects by his owners, who placed various balls and toys around their apartment and asked Rico to fetch specific ones. To make sure Rico’s owners weren’t giving him subconscious cues that helped him find the right item, Julia Fischer and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, tested Rico’s knowledge in a lab, where he retrieved 37 out of 40 items correctly.So far, so good. Dogs, parrots and monkeys can certainly learn to associate objects with particular human vocalizations.

But then the skeptic in me raised a red flag when the scientists jumped to a more advanced conclusion.The team then tested Rico’s ability to employ fast mapping, a neurological process that toddlers use to quickly guess the meaning of new words. The researchers put an unfamiliar object in a room with other things he did know and, without teaching Rico the name of the novel item, asked him to get it. Seven times out of 10 he returned with the correct object. So did Rico use human-type reasoning to determine which object to return? Maybe, but I think there is insufficient evidence given to arrive at that conclusion. "To make sure Rico's owners weren't giving him cues...they tested him in a lab"? What? A lab removes all confounding factors? Is that why Uri Geller worked so well in a lab? Did they use other people's voices? How did they ask for objects? "Get me the car keys, Rico. No, not those, the ones over there. No, yes, those...good boy!"

Did they employ the services of a magician? No mention. How many objects were in the piles, and how many were known and unknown? Very little info is supplied about this. How similar were the objects? How random were the names called out? Were all trials recorded, or just the most promising ones? There is a serious lack of good science here, or maybe just a lack of good reporting. Or wishful thinking.

Why would you need a magician to spot fraud or mistakes? Consider the famous Clever Hans (http://skepdic.com/cleverhans.html) case of a century ago, who appeared to fool even his trainer. Using other handlers, Hans was just a stupid horse; the cleverness was in the animal's reaction to the trainer's cueing, not native intelligence.

From another site about Clever Hans (http://dogtraining.co.uk/hans.htm):
[The investigator's] analysis was the first scientific warning of the danger of 'reading conscious thought processes into an animals behaviour.' What may appear to be actions of great intelligence might prove to be an animal providing answers to ‘questions’ quite other than those apparently asked.

I wonder if Rico plans to apply for the million-dollar paranormal prize.

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To their credit, the NY Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/science/11dog.html) is less credulous, once you get past the title.The owners say the dog knows the names of 200 objects. The scientists did not test this claim but said anecdotal evidence supported it... hidden cues have invalidated other impressive achievements of animals, most famously those of a horse known as Clever Hans who was said to have done arithmetic but was actually responding to unconscious cues from his owners.

Dr. Bloom added that without further experiment, it was unclear that Rico's performance was related to the way children learn words. "It is too early to give up on the view that babies learn words and dogs do not," he concluded.
It looks like the owner gave the command, but it does not say exactly how, or how often:In a commentary accompanying the Science article, Dr. Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale, wrote that the proper scientific controls were used in the experiment to avoid the possibility of cues from the owner other than the command.A more proper scientific control would be using someone else, not the owner.Dr. Bloom added that without further experiment, it was unclear that Rico's performance was related to the way children learn words. "It is too early to give up on the view that babies learn words and dogs do not," he concluded.But it didn't prevent the paper from writing a more effusive and misleading title: "Finally, an Old Dog That Can Learn New Tricks."

The source article for this report is in Science magazine, which requires a fee to access online, so I haven't been able to see it. The SDMB is the only thing online worth paying for. :)

[Bippy the Beardless]

This is allready being discussed in the following current (though silly named) thread.
[Research Finds Dogs Understand Language] Does this mean we have to stop eating them?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=260877

[Zagadka]

When's the last time a labcoat fetched your slippers?

Though they do selflessly protect clothing from chemical stains. Dogs tend to run when you throw acid at them.

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Interesting that another thread on this topic was started before this one. Before initiating this, I searched for "rico OR germany OR collie OR planck OR bloom," thinking those were key words from all news articles. The other thread contained (at least at the time) none of these, so it didn't show up on the search radar.

I would sure like to see this research duplicated a few times with better controls. It reminds me of the Koko (gorilla) research so highly regarded until people began pointing out, from viewing the videos, that the trainer wasn't so much cueing the ape as interpreting the ape. When Koko made an error, it wasn't a "mistake," but she was just tired or like to kid around. When she said something right, it was credited to intelligence.

I've seen some gal doing this with Alex, a gray parrot. The researcher claims that the parrot can distinguish colors, an abstraction one step more intelligent than just associations of words with objects. Yet the trainer could only get a responce from the birdbrain if she repeated the question numerous times: "What color is this? Come on, what color? Tell me, is this red? green? what color?", etc. If the bird then says, "red!" it gets credit for a right answer, and the news services report the parrot can reason. Maybe it can, but this test doesn't verify that. Any magician will recognize this prompting technique from mindreading exercises as a gimmick; it may have been unconscious or deliberate on the trainer's part, I don't know. But it is suspicious.

Koko's online chat session (http://www.ontology.com/canton/weird/koko/)

Notice that the trainer is "interpreting" whatever K the G says or doesn't say. A lot like facilitated communication. (Alex the talking African gray parrot) Here's Cecil's take on the situation. (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030328.html)