Rico is a Border collie that knows the names of 200 objects. His owners started training him to learn the names of toys when he was sick at 10-months old and could not leave the house. When asked to go and retrieve a particular toy i.e. the ‘yellow pokemon’, he will correctly pick out the ‘yellow pokemon’ amongst all the other +- 200 toys!!!
RICO! photo credit Manuela Hartling / Reuters
He can learn the name of a new toy in one trial by using a canine equivalent of a mechanism called “fast mapping”, also used by humans. This means that a new toy was placed amongst familiar toys. Rico was asked to retrieve the new toy. He would correctly retrieve the new toy, probably by a process of elimination. What is also noteworthy is that he could also remember item’s names four weeks after his last exposure.
Rico has appeared on many TV shows and have been studied by many scientist, amongst them Julia Fischer of Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Fischer was sceptical that the owners might be unconsciously giving Rico subtle cues to retrieve the correct item, a phenomenon known as the “Clever Hans” effect. Clever Hans was a horse famous in the early 1900s for doing calculus by tapping answers to equations with his hoof. Later, the psychologist Oskar Pfungst discovered that Clever Hans’ owner did the math and then gave the horse a raised eyebrow, or nod, to stop when he reached the correct number of taps.
To control the experiments for Rico, Fischer had Rico and his owner sit in a separate room (so that his owner could not wittingly or unwittingly give Rico signals) while she arranged random toys on the floor. Then she would join Rico and his owner and have the owner tell him to fetch specific (and new) items in the next room. Rico was successful 37 times out of 40 !!