Dogs communicate in all different ways that humans instantly recognize, by wagging their tails, barking and smiling. Now a new study says they can also communicate by pushing buttons on a soundboard that correlate with specific concepts such as “food” or “go outside.”

What You Need To Know

  • Dogs can communicate by pushing buttons on a soundboard that correlate with specific concepts such as “food” or “go outside,” according to a new study published Friday in the scientific journal Nature

  • The study found dogs that pressed two-button sequences did not just press them at random but did so to express concepts related to their routine activities and needs

  • Controlling for probabilities, the researchers found the combination of buttons pressed for "food" and "play" occurred more often than could be expected by chance

  • The single buttons dogs pressed most often were "go outside," "food," "play," "treat," "potty" and "water"

In a study published this week in the scientific journal Nature, owners of 152 pets that use soundboard training were asked to report button presses made by their dogs. They found the dogs that pressed two-button sequences did not just press them at random but did so to express concepts related to their routine activities and needs.

Owners who train their dogs using soundboards demonstrate the outcomes of pressing the voice-recorded buttons, offering food after pressing the food button, for example. The owners then stopped modelling the outcomes once their their dogs began pressing the buttons without being prompted.

Controlling for probabilities, the researchers found the combination of buttons pressed for “food” and “play” occurred more often than could be expected by chance. The single buttons the dogs pressed most often were “go outside" and "food,” followed by “play,” “treat,” “potty” and “water.”

“Our results show that owner-trained pets can use soundboards to make non-random and deliberate button presses which are not simply repetitions of the presses made by their owners,” the researchers wrote in Nature.