Learning by inference[edit]
A study found that handing an object between experimenters who then used the object's name in a sentence successfully taught an observing dog each object's name, allowing the dog to subsequently retrieve the item.[27]
In humans, "fast mapping" is the ability to form quick and rough hypotheses about the meaning of a new word after only a single exposure. In 2004, a study with Rico, a Border Collie, showed he was able to fast map. Rico initially knew the labels of over 200 items. He inferred the names of novel items by exclusion learning and correctly retrieved those items immediately and four weeks after the initial exposure.
Rico was able to interpret phrases such as "fetch the sock" by its component words (rather than considering its utterance to be a single word). Rico could also give the sock to a specified person. This retrieval rate is comparable to the performance of 3-year-old humans.[11]
In 2008, Betsy, another Border Collie, knew over 340 words and was able to connect an object with a photographic image of the object, despite having seen neither before.[28]