puppies! and how they're like us

[laurenfuentes]

These articles seemed to really reflect on what we have been discussing in class about language— that perhaps the mechanisms surrounding the acquisition of language are not language specific as many theorists such as Chompsky have previously argued. Instead, these articles offer the human-like social skills of domesticated dogs as evidence for not only general learning and memory mechanisms mediating fast mapping, but also for the evolutionary specification of dogs for emotional reactivity by humans, which in turn helps to explain the evolution of human language development. It is certainly obvious that the many findings reflected in these articles have a wide breathe of applications.
Firstly, I think it is important to address the implications of domestic dogs’ ability to fast map. Kaminski et al. found that, in fact, dogs were able to fast map, much like a human three-year-old child, concluding that the dog knew that objects have labels, learned by exclusion, and could store that knowledge as memory. So what makes dogs so special that they can do this while other animals cannot? And what do dogs have in common with humans that they can perform the same task? While the other two articles did not address fast mapping specifically, I do believe that their emotional reactivity hypothesis may help answer these questions. The articles make a straightforward claim that domesticated dogs have been selectively bred for human compatibility, which would translate to like temperament and ability to interpret social cues. It is such an innate temperament, these articles argue that has not only allowed the development of social skills with humans but also separates domestic dogs from other animals such as chimps, who are often considered the more similar animals to humans, but do not display the same kind of behavior such as sharing, etc.
According to these social skills that domesticated dogs have been selected for, as permitted by their inherent temperament, fast mapping in some ways is a given. While perhaps the cognitive and memory capacity cannot be accounted for through this particular theory, I do believe that attention to social cues as well as a desire to interact is key in the ability to fast map as these qualities are evident in both young children and domesticated dogs. In their study, Hare and Tomasello find that a dog’s performance in finding a toy or treat is determined based on the social cueing. What is remarkable about this is that a dog’s sensitivity to social cuing exists almost from birth independent from amount of human handling. Aspects of a dog’s ability to understand social cues are reflected in a child’s ability, such the use of discrimination and the ability to follow eye gaze and gestures. Moving back to fast mapping, we can now see how perhaps these social cues play a greater role in maybe not so much the full action of fast mapping, but rather its initiation. Without the ability to understand what an adult is trying to indicate and to discriminate between objects, reasoning about each, children would not be able to capture the object as a referent and attach it to a label.

For class, I thought it might be interesting to maybe discuss how humans may have evolved the way we have pressured domestic dogs to.