The weekend of 25th and 26th of January 2025, Claudia will be sharing with us her studies on social learning with special focus on puppies.
She will also give us an overview of recent studies about social cognition, and introduce her exciting new topic of research: The Gifted Word Learner Dogs.
Practical Informations:
Lectures will be from 10.00 - 16.00 both days!
Price: 3100.-DKK
Including in price is light lunch both days, the/coffee/ and afternoon cake&fruits.
Adresse: Borgmester Jørgensensvej 2, 9000 Aalborg. Center for menneske-dyr-psykologi.
Registering and questions, write to: Mally@nordicabc.com
We look forward seeing you there!
Learn more about the topics:
The extraordinary abilities and immense potential of Gifted Word Learner dogs:
Dogs that can learn object verbal labels – e.g., the names of their toys - are extremely rare. While most typical family dogs cannot learn the names of even two objects, these few exceptional dogs
easily acquire a vocabulary of hundreds of object labels during spontaneous play sessions with their owners, in the absence of intentional training. This is why they are called “Gifted Word
Learner dogs (GWL)”.
Until recently, very little was known about this phenomenon, but in the last few years, with the help of an innovative scientific project capitalising on a social media campaign, we managed to
recruit an unprecedentedly large sample of GWL dogs, from all over the world.
Our research demonstrates that GWL dogs have an extraordinary rapid rate of acquisition, learning new labels after hearing it only four times (fugazza et al. 2021a). They can even acquire
new labels by eavesdropping on their owners’ conversations. Once they have learned an object label, they can remember it for up to two years (Dror et al. 2021), and some GWL dogs
spontaneously categorise objects according to shape (Fugazza and Miklosi 2020).
In my talk I will share more of what we know about GWL dogs’ cognitive abilities and present their immense potential as a comparative model for studying a variety of different cognitive
mechanisms that are elusive to study in non-linguistic animals. By varying the conditions under which we ask GWL dogs to retrieve toys, we can discover more about the relationship between
language and mental representations (Dror, Sommese et al. 2022) By comparing these dogs to typical dogs (i.e., dogs that do not learn object labels), we can study how words influence mental
processes (Fugazza et al. 2022). As these dogs present a unique case of an extraordinary skill in a nonhuman species, they may even serve as a model to study what makes some minds exceptional (talent; Fugazza et al. 2021b).
Social learning in dogs:
More than a decade of research uncovered dogs’ surprising socio-cognitive skills. Dogs are not only able, but even predisposed to acquire information socially from humans.
In this talk I will present the studies that revealed dogs’ natural skills in interacting with humans as social partners. I will present results showing the effect of domestication on dogs
socio-cognitive traits as well as studies that show that social learning skills and social referencing develop early in dogs, as 8-week-old dog puppies already show evidence of such cognitive abilities.
I will first describe the studies carried out using the Do as I Do method, because they allowed us to discover more about the “dogs’ mind”, investigating on topics that were elusive with
other methods.
Dogs trained with Do as I Do learn to match their behaviour to actions demonstrated by a human model, when asked to do so (Topál et al. 2006; Fugazza and Miklósi 2014a).
By the use of this paradigm we studied several socio-cognitive skills, such as the ability to imitate, the ability of understanding the goals of others, deferred imitation and different types of
memory of others’ actions (Fugazza et al. 2015), including episodic-like memory, a type of memory that was previously thought to be uniquely human (Fugazza et al. 2016). We also
applied a modified version of this method to study the ability of dogs to represent and remember their own actions (a building block of self-awareness; Fugazza et al. 2018).
We also devoted part of our research to applied topics regarding the use of the Do as I do method in dog-training procedures. The Do as I Do method proved more efficient than methods relying on associative learning (Fugazza and Miklósi 2014b) and it proved to
enhance dogs’ memory and generalization of the trained action (Fugazza and Miklósi 2015).
We suggest that the mental representation of the trained action that emerges as a result of being trained with social learning or operant conditioning is different.
Dogs’ predisposition to imitate human actions spontaneously emerges early and also in the absence of food rewards. The results of our research pave the way to the development
of novel, ethologically oriented methods to train puppies, relying on their natural predisposition rather than using food (Fugazza et al. 2018a; b; 2023).
Dr. Claudia Fugazza, PhD.
Researcher at the Department of Ethology in Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest). Her research is focused on dogs’ social cognitive abilities. She developed a training method called Do as I Do (named after Hayes & Hayes 1952 and Topál et al. 2006), which relies on dog’s imitative skills and is currently using it as paradigm to study dogs’ cognition. Due to its effectiveness, this method also spread in the applied field of dog training and she devote part of her research to study its effectiveness.
She obtained her PhD in Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) conducting research on social learning and imitation in dogs.
Claudia received her B.Sc. on Dog Breeding and Education (TACREC), a Master in Ethology of Companion Animals and a Master in Dog Training at the University of Pisa (Italy).
She published a book on the use of social learning in dog training, Fugazza C. 2011 “DO AS I DO Using Social Learning to Train Dogs” – Ed. Haqihana (Milano) translated in other 5 languages and a DVD, Fugazza C. 2013 “Do as I Do. A new training method based on social learning” Ed. Tawzerdog (USA)
Claudia travels around the world and lecturer at several seminars about social learning in dogs and its use in dog training.
And here you can read more about Center for Human-Animal-Psyshology, Aalborg University:
