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聽聽看一篇討論狗兒智能的文章：音檔

Dog lovers have been saying it for years: dogs are smarter than many people give them credit for.

Now, scientists are joining in. Over the past decade, research into canine behavior and intelligence has been blossoming, and a range of experiments have suggested that dogs are capable of surprisingly complex feats of social intelligence and emotional sensitivity. On the whole, psychologist and dog researcher Stanley Coren estimates, the average dog's intelligence is roughly as sophisticated as a 2.5­year­old baby's.

So far, research has suggested that dogs can read our cues, show emotional connection to their owners, and even display jealousy. Studies have found that the brightest dogs appear to be capable of learning hundreds of words. It's likely that these abilities have been shaped by evolution — over thousands of years, we've selected those dogs best adapted to live with humans.

The field is still new, however, and researchers keep finding out a surprising amount. "Most labs have historically been invested in rodent and monkey models," says Gregory Berns, an Emory neuroscientist who conducts MRI research with dogs. "But dogs are unique animals, and I think in many ways they're one of the best animals for understanding social behaviors."

Using newer technologies such as MRI as well as carefully designed behavioral experiments, a handful of labs around the world have dug into the dog psyche — and found that they're much smarter than many people assume. Dogs that are trained not to take a piece of food do so much more often when an observing human has left the room, closed his or her eyes, or turned away. Again, it sounds very easy, but understanding the significance of a gaze in this way is something chimps do not seem to be capable of.

Still other studies show that dogs can pick up on our judgments of objects and act accordingly.

Dogs vary in their ability to remember things — just like humans and members of all animal species. But some dogs with particularly good memories, scientists have found, can be trained to remember more than 1,000 different words.

The most famous case is a border collie named Chaser, who has been trained by a retired psychology professor named John Pilley. As documented in a 2011 study in Behavioral Processes, Chaser has learned the names of 1,022 different toys — when directed to pick a specific toy up, she retrieves the correct one about 95 percent of the time. More recently, Pilley has trained Chaser to recognize verbs, as well: she now knows the difference between picking up something, putting her paw on it, and putting her nose to it.

Chaser's abilities might be unusual, but she's not unique. Another border collie named Rico has been shown to recognize more than 200 different words, and is capable of a cognitive process called "fast­mapping" — when he hears a new word; he knows to go get a new toy, rather than one he's already learned the word for.

Many people assume their dogs can only process the tone of their speech — but experiments by Victoria Ratcliffe, a psychology researcher at the University of Sussex, suggest their brains are processing the actual words, as well.