Purina has partnered with the University of California San Diego to explore whether pets can use Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) devices, such as audio buttons, to communicate with humans. A $200,000 grant will support UC San Diego’s Comparative Cognition Lab in studying pets’ cognitive abilities using soundboards with buttons labeled for various words like “play,” “outside,” and “walk.” The research aims to understand how effectively pets can combine words to convey their needs, potentially paving the way for citizen science studies in this area. Recent findings from the lab indicate that trained dogs can use AIC devices in contextually meaningful ways.
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