Dogs Can Remember Toy Names for Up to Two Years

A research team from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary has found that certain dogs can remember the names of toys for up to two years. This experiment, detailed in Biology Letters by Shany Dror, Ádám Miklósi, and Claudia Fugazza, involved teaching dogs the names of various toys and then hiding these toys for a two-year period to assess their long-term memory capabilities.

Earlier research indicated that dogs can link human words with specific toys. For example, when asked to fetch a toy named "Squeaker," dogs can identify and retrieve it from a group of toys. Additionally, it has been observed that some dog breeds and individual dogs are particularly skilled at these tasks, known as gifted word learner dogs.

The goal of this study was to determine whether these dogs maintain their toy-name associations through repeated exposure or if they can retain this information in long-term memory, similar to humans. The researchers conducted their experiment with five dogs that had previously been trained to match names with toys and fetch them upon request.

In the experiment, each dog learned the names of 12 new toys. After confirming that the dogs had memorized the names, the researchers stored the toys away for two years. Later, they reintroduced the toys to the dogs, mixed with familiar toys in another room, and asked the dogs to retrieve the correct toys by name. Each dog underwent two tests per toy.

The study revealed that, on average, the dogs retrieved the correct toy 44% of the time, with some achieving up to 60% accuracy. These results, which are significantly higher than chance, suggest that the dogs successfully retained the names of the toys over the two-year period, indicating that they stored this information in their long-term memory.