Publication Date:
2004-06-12
Description:
During speech acquisition, children form quick and rough hypotheses about the meaning of a new word after only a single exposure-a process dubbed "fast mapping." Here we provide evidence that a border collie, Rico, is able to fast map. Rico knew the labels of over 200 different items. He inferred the names of novel items by exclusion learning and correctly retrieved those items right away as well as 4 weeks after the initial exposure. Fast mapping thus appears to be mediated by general learning and memory mechanisms also found in other animals and not by a language acquisition device that is special to humans.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Kaminski, Juliane -- Call, Josep -- Fischer, Julia -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2004 Jun 11;304(5677):1682-3.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15192233" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
*Dogs
;
*Learning
;
Male
;
*Memory
;
Random Allocation
;
*Vocabulary
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
