My wife has thought about getting one of those things, and I pointed out that if she really wanted to hear "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now"...
My wife has thought about getting one of those things, and I pointed out that if she really wanted to hear "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" instead of the nigh-silent tilt of the head and lick of the lips that I'd trained our dog to do, the consequences would be on her head.
She thought better of it.
Dogs are perfectly able to communicate with an attentive owner without a soundboard. And it can be on a much quieter and more pleasant basis.
Mr. Tired and I discussed getting the buttons when TiredPup was a baby, but decided against it quickly when she was understanding full sentences when I talked to her. We are a childfree home, and...
Mr. Tired and I discussed getting the buttons when TiredPup was a baby, but decided against it quickly when she was understanding full sentences when I talked to her. We are a childfree home, and I spend the majority of my day with her. I talk to her, play with her, feed her, snuggle her, walk her, train her, take her to the vet. Mr. Tired shares these tasks with me pretty evenly, but she comes to work with me, and I take her more places than he does.
She understands exactly what I tell her, and I can understand what she wants, just based on a look from her. She stares deeply into my eyes, and I understand exactly what she's trying to tell me.
I haven't seen any videos on these soundboards that convince me that the dog is communicating more than "if I press some of these buttons, my owner becomes excited." I've seen several videos from...
I haven't seen any videos on these soundboards that convince me that the dog is communicating more than "if I press some of these buttons, my owner becomes excited." I've seen several videos from some of the most popular channels, and none of them prove anything at all. Most of the "proof" just seems like confirmation bias. Even if the dog pushed the "water" button while you were watering plants, what about all the other times you handled water and they didn't push the button? Or perhaps you trained the dog to push a certain button while you're doing a certain thing?
Of course, pets do communicate a lot with their owners using tools or actions (common ones are ringing a bell to go outside or play bow for play time), but so far I see these soundboards as somewhere between Clever Hans and fortune tellers. Clever Hans being the horse that could answer questions by reading his owners body language, and fortune telling being noise that people can easily layer their desires on top of to result in interesting interpretations.
I'd love to see more research on the topic though. Seems like there is some, but not a lot.
Speaking as a person with a cat who actively uses a soundboard, she 100% knows what she's doing. When she pushes Treat, she sits up and waits for me to toss one. When she pushes Chase, she runs...
Speaking as a person with a cat who actively uses a soundboard, she 100% knows what she's doing. When she pushes Treat, she sits up and waits for me to toss one. When she pushes Chase, she runs for the hallway because I'm going to throw one for her. When she pushes Puzzle, she walks over to sit by the kibble puzzle to wait for me to refill it. It's not a response to me - it's a request, and her own action after pushing the button demonstrates it.
It's worth noting that there's a BIG difference between the type of knowledge exhibited by your cat (and most animals with buttons like this), which is best explained by operant conditioning, and...
It's worth noting that there's a BIG difference between the type of knowledge exhibited by your cat (and most animals with buttons like this), which is best explained by operant conditioning, and the claims that there's deeper understanding of actual language going on. Your cat definitely has learned an association between the button press and particular activities or objects, and she presses the buttons to ask for things. But that doesn't mean there's any understanding of meaning going on -- it's fundamentally no different from training a dog to ring a bell when it needs to go outside. And when the buttons start getting into abstract concepts like "love", the operant conditioning ends up being quite similar to the Clever Hans effect, in which the humans get excited when the animal presses buttons so the animal is conditioned to press the buttons more for attention.
Attempts to show that this is something deeper than simple operant conditioning rely on really sketchy "interpretation" of combinations of button presses, and every example ends up being human "interpreters" reading into utterances (we as humans are really good at trying to wring meaning out of anything even plausibly linguistic, even when it's actually pretty meaningless or random!) This has happened with far smarter animals than cats and dogs, too -- if you've heard of Coco the gorilla, she too wasn't really able to "speak" sign language and was not communicating anything nearly as complex as the phony interpretations that we essentially made up by her human "caretaker".
Author Mary Robinette Kowal occasionally posts on Bluesky about her cat using a soundboard with a lot of buttons. Here's one about the cat responding to a new sweater...
Author Mary Robinette Kowal occasionally posts on Bluesky about her cat using a soundboard with a lot of buttons.
These two comments basically show the line between the parts of these systems that I think are legit and the parts that I think are highly questionable. The commenter above mentions the cat asking...
These two comments basically show the line between the parts of these systems that I think are legit and the parts that I think are highly questionable.
The commenter above mentions the cat asking for food or for play time, which are both things that my dog can signal to me without a sound board. I also mentioned signaling the desire to go outside in my previous comment.
The example here with "litterbox fabric litterbox" followed by "and word want" and "frustrated scared" seems like the kind of thing where if the cat presses enough buttons you eventually find some situation where you can interpret the output in a way that you think fits the situation. The "and word want" part is especially suspicious. Do we really think that this cat is calling the sweater shit, using conjunctions, then expressing emotion, or did we just get a word salad that happens to have some parts that can be interpreted to fit the situation? If I put some article of clothing on my dog and he doesn't like it, he'll try to take it off, which is a pretty obvious sign. I don't find it convincing that these buttons are conveying more complex thoughts than what we're already getting through body language. I'm not saying that somewhat more complex communication with pets doesn't exist, but I don't think these kinds of snippets are showing much.
Yeah, there's a big difference between "my cat tells me when she wants food" and "my cat is in touch with her emotions to such a degree that she can identify when she's frustrated, an emotion many...
Yeah, there's a big difference between "my cat tells me when she wants food" and "my cat is in touch with her emotions to such a degree that she can identify when she's frustrated, an emotion many humans can't identify."
Plus anyone who has ever seen a scared cat knows how difficult it would be to try to teach a cat to press a specific button when it feels scared. A scared cat is in fight or flight mode.
“Outside” was one of the recommended first words in the informal pedagogy of dog-button learning, created by a speech-language pathologist named Christina Hunger. In 2018, when Hunger was raising her Blue-Heeler Catahoula puppy Stella, she noticed that Stella was progressing through the early stages of communication much as the young toddlers she worked with did. Hunger taught children to speak by tapping icons on a tablet. She wondered: Could Stella learn words through a similar method?
To test this hypothesis, Hunger bought a set of recordable buttons that, when pressed, would play back her voice saying simple words — OUTSIDE, WATER, PLAY — and fastened them to a board on the floor. Every time she talked to Stella, she pressed the corresponding button. About a month later, Stella caught on, pressing OUTSIDE to use the bathroom in the yard, and PLAY to request playtime. After a few months, she pressed WATER when Christina was watering plants. Stella was narrating what she saw, Hunger thought. Hunger expanded Stella’s board, adding emotions like MAD and social words like BYE.
When Stella started putting multiple words together, Hunger wasn’t too surprised. Dogs are about as smart as a 2½-year-old human, and Hunger knew that toddlers of that age typically compose sentences of two or three words. After a year, Stella was saying BED LATER and WANT OUTSIDE NOW. One day, the end of daylight saving time delayed Stella’s mealtime. She asked for food, and Hunger told her to wait. In protest, she stomped over to her buttons and pressed LOVE YOU NO.
Hunger’s blog of Stella’s progress went viral, and other dog owners started experimenting with the buttons. Those accounts themselves went viral. A movement grew. The dogs who used the buttons had some things in common. First, their owners spent a lot of time with them, talking to them, looking at them, pressing buttons with them. Second, these owners were often women, with no children in the house. As for the dogs themselves, many had bossy personalities. They had things they needed you to know. A pit bull named Tilda pressed SOUND twice every time her owner joined a weekly game of Dungeons and Dragons. Should I wear headphones? the owner wondered. A golden retriever named Cache pressed WORRIED when his owner turned on the stove to cook dinner, because he wasn’t a fan of all the sizzling and popping.
Savage. 😭 (I assume/wonder if the dog tries to communicate to the owner that it feels the owner is not loving the dog rather than the more funny interpretation that the dog doesn't love the owner...
One day, the end of daylight saving time delayed Stella’s mealtime. She asked for food, and Hunger told her to wait. In protest, she stomped over to her buttons and pressed LOVE YOU NO.
Savage. 😭 (I assume/wonder if the dog tries to communicate to the owner that it feels the owner is not loving the dog rather than the more funny interpretation that the dog doesn't love the owner anymore because of a late dinner.)
My wife has thought about getting one of those things, and I pointed out that if she really wanted to hear "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" "food now" instead of the nigh-silent tilt of the head and lick of the lips that I'd trained our dog to do, the consequences would be on her head.
She thought better of it.
Dogs are perfectly able to communicate with an attentive owner without a soundboard. And it can be on a much quieter and more pleasant basis.
Mr. Tired and I discussed getting the buttons when TiredPup was a baby, but decided against it quickly when she was understanding full sentences when I talked to her. We are a childfree home, and I spend the majority of my day with her. I talk to her, play with her, feed her, snuggle her, walk her, train her, take her to the vet. Mr. Tired shares these tasks with me pretty evenly, but she comes to work with me, and I take her more places than he does.
She understands exactly what I tell her, and I can understand what she wants, just based on a look from her. She stares deeply into my eyes, and I understand exactly what she's trying to tell me.
I haven't seen any videos on these soundboards that convince me that the dog is communicating more than "if I press some of these buttons, my owner becomes excited." I've seen several videos from some of the most popular channels, and none of them prove anything at all. Most of the "proof" just seems like confirmation bias. Even if the dog pushed the "water" button while you were watering plants, what about all the other times you handled water and they didn't push the button? Or perhaps you trained the dog to push a certain button while you're doing a certain thing?
Of course, pets do communicate a lot with their owners using tools or actions (common ones are ringing a bell to go outside or play bow for play time), but so far I see these soundboards as somewhere between Clever Hans and fortune tellers. Clever Hans being the horse that could answer questions by reading his owners body language, and fortune telling being noise that people can easily layer their desires on top of to result in interesting interpretations.
I'd love to see more research on the topic though. Seems like there is some, but not a lot.
Speaking as a person with a cat who actively uses a soundboard, she 100% knows what she's doing. When she pushes Treat, she sits up and waits for me to toss one. When she pushes Chase, she runs for the hallway because I'm going to throw one for her. When she pushes Puzzle, she walks over to sit by the kibble puzzle to wait for me to refill it. It's not a response to me - it's a request, and her own action after pushing the button demonstrates it.
It's worth noting that there's a BIG difference between the type of knowledge exhibited by your cat (and most animals with buttons like this), which is best explained by operant conditioning, and the claims that there's deeper understanding of actual language going on. Your cat definitely has learned an association between the button press and particular activities or objects, and she presses the buttons to ask for things. But that doesn't mean there's any understanding of meaning going on -- it's fundamentally no different from training a dog to ring a bell when it needs to go outside. And when the buttons start getting into abstract concepts like "love", the operant conditioning ends up being quite similar to the Clever Hans effect, in which the humans get excited when the animal presses buttons so the animal is conditioned to press the buttons more for attention.
Attempts to show that this is something deeper than simple operant conditioning rely on really sketchy "interpretation" of combinations of button presses, and every example ends up being human "interpreters" reading into utterances (we as humans are really good at trying to wring meaning out of anything even plausibly linguistic, even when it's actually pretty meaningless or random!) This has happened with far smarter animals than cats and dogs, too -- if you've heard of Coco the gorilla, she too wasn't really able to "speak" sign language and was not communicating anything nearly as complex as the phony interpretations that we essentially made up by her human "caretaker".
Author Mary Robinette Kowal occasionally posts on Bluesky about her cat using a soundboard with a lot of buttons.
Here's one about the cat responding to a new sweater https://bsky.app/profile/maryrobinettekowal.com/post/3l745m3nj6n2d
These two comments basically show the line between the parts of these systems that I think are legit and the parts that I think are highly questionable.
The commenter above mentions the cat asking for food or for play time, which are both things that my dog can signal to me without a sound board. I also mentioned signaling the desire to go outside in my previous comment.
The example here with "litterbox fabric litterbox" followed by "and word want" and "frustrated scared" seems like the kind of thing where if the cat presses enough buttons you eventually find some situation where you can interpret the output in a way that you think fits the situation. The "and word want" part is especially suspicious. Do we really think that this cat is calling the sweater shit, using conjunctions, then expressing emotion, or did we just get a word salad that happens to have some parts that can be interpreted to fit the situation? If I put some article of clothing on my dog and he doesn't like it, he'll try to take it off, which is a pretty obvious sign. I don't find it convincing that these buttons are conveying more complex thoughts than what we're already getting through body language. I'm not saying that somewhat more complex communication with pets doesn't exist, but I don't think these kinds of snippets are showing much.
Yeah, there's a big difference between "my cat tells me when she wants food" and "my cat is in touch with her emotions to such a degree that she can identify when she's frustrated, an emotion many humans can't identify."
Plus anyone who has ever seen a scared cat knows how difficult it would be to try to teach a cat to press a specific button when it feels scared. A scared cat is in fight or flight mode.
Savage. 😭 (I assume/wonder if the dog tries to communicate to the owner that it feels the owner is not loving the dog rather than the more funny interpretation that the dog doesn't love the owner anymore because of a late dinner.)
I interpreted it as "I love you, but no, I refuse to wait"