Purina helps to give Dogs a Voice

Purina is investing in research with the University of California San Diego to understand if pets can leverage Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) devices, or audio buttons, to better communicate with humans, reports the company in a press release. The partnership includes a 200,000 dollars grant to the university's Comparative Cognition Lab, according to Purina one of the world's leading labs for research studies on pet communication, to support research on the use of soundboard-based audio buttons to gain a deeper understanding of pets' cognitive abilities. This shall help Purina understand the feasibility of future citizen science studies using the technology.

The soundboards used for the research are equipped with buttons, which, when pressed, play a recording of a word, such as "outside," "play," "walk," or "potty." Through the research, UC San Diego's Comparative Cognition Lab and Purina aim to better understand to what degree pets can use the buttons to put words together to communicate their wants, needs and thoughts.

"What excites me most about this research partnership is the opportunity to give pets an actual voice in our research for the first time," said Dr. Annie Valuska, principal scientist on Purina's pet behavior team. "Working with the Lab and thousands of at-home pet button users will allow us to explore new ways to better understand the needs and wants of our canine consumers." In a recently published paper, the Comparative Cognition Lab showed that dogs trained to use AIC devices pay attention to and respond in contextually appropriate ways to play-related and outside-related words. In an earlier review study, the lab has shown that some animals can be trained to use AIC devices to make simple requests of their caretakers.