A canine animal model for a better understanding of giftedness in humans

Some highly gifted dogs have a more exceptional ability to learn human language than others. This ability has not gone unnoticed, and researchers have sought to use dogs as animal models to understand the origin of individual variation in cognitive abilities, particularly that of exceptional performance.   We are not all born equal. The origin of the development of behavioral individuality is a fundamental question in cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Individual variability is present in all organisms, whether in terms of morphology, behavior, or cognitive performance—even among genetically identical individuals such as twins. Thus, some individuals demonstrate superior abilities compared to others. Not all humans possess the same musical, linguistic, or mathematical abilities—this is a fact. The origin of individual variation in cognitive abilities has long been debated. There is no consensus regarding the underlying mechanisms. Some seem to favor a genetic cause, while others believe that the environment or training plays a more significant role in exceptional talent. At the population level, cognitive performance across different domains generally follows a continuous distribution, but a few rare individuals demonstrate exceptional talent in a specific domain. Their performance thus represents an outlier in the overall distribution of talents. Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are well-known examples of this phenomenon. The factors underlying these high-potential exceptions remain unknown, especially since the biological foundations of exceptional human performance are extremely difficult to study, in part because it is hard to find a relatively large population of exceptionally gifted individuals. The discovery of individual cognitive traits that are stable over time in nonhuman vertebrates and invertebrates facilitates research on behavioral variations. These animal models offer genetic, neuromodulatory, and neurodevelopmental explanations for systematic behavioral differences. Recently, the dog has been proposed as a natural model for studying several cognitive and behavioral traits shared with humans. The canine species, which evolves and develops within the human environment, represents an ideal model—particularly in the socio-cognitive domain—for studying the evolution of language-related skills. Dogs indeed offer interesting insights into how certain functionally similar traits can emerge in phylogenetically distant species, involving specific brain regions, and also help shed light on the evolution of these traits in humans. Some dogs are thus capable of learning a large number of words. But such cases are rare; only a few exceptional individuals possess this learning ability. Hungarian researchers therefore decided to test dogs’ linguistic abilities. To assess word learning, they systematically and intensively trained puppies and adult dogs to remember at least two object names over a three-month period, and compared their abilities to those of six pedigree dogs that already knew the names of about fifteen objects. These six dogs were the only ones, with one exception, to pass the tests: they learned between 2 and 11 new names for toys during the first month, between 3 and 12 during the second month, and between 2 and 13 during the third month. This ability to learn quickly is therefore absent in the vast majority of dogs, regardless of their age and despite intensive training. It represents a specific skill that tends to emerge only in certain individuals. These few individuals gifted with the ability to learn words are outliers and can be considered exceptional, at least as far as learning the names of objects is concerned. Although their prior knowledge may partly explain this above-average performance, their rarity and the absence of prior training indicate that these dogs possess a specific quality far superior to that of the general canine population and that their exceptional ability and performance are comparable to the phenomenon of giftedness and extreme individual variation in cognitive traits among humans. The authors argue that dogs thus provide an ideal and representative model for studying the origins and mental mechanisms of qualitative variation in human cognitive performance, such as perfect pitch in music and other similar phenomena in mathematics and linguistics.