Dogs classify toys by function, new study finds
In home-like settings, seven gifted dogs generalize toy use to new items, extending their understanding of object labels.
Seven dogs—six Border Collies and one Blue Heeler—demonstrated an ability to group toys by function rather than appearance, a trait that helps extend learned labels to new situations. The findings, published this week in Current Biology, show the dogs can classify playthings by whether they are used for fetching or for pulling, even when the toys differ in shape and color.
Most of the dogs were previously identified as Gifted Word Learners (GWLs), dogs known to acquire dozens of toy names through everyday play. In the study, owners first taught the dogs to associate the commands fetch and pull not with single toys, but with groups of toys used for those activities. After the dogs demonstrated they could retrieve the correct item on command, researchers introduced brand-new toys with no labels. In test trials, when asked to pick a toy for fetching or pulling, the dogs selected the correct item far more often than chance would allow.
Lead researcher Claudia Fugazza of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest noted the effect in a natural home setting, describing that the study was done with ordinary owners playing with their dogs for about a week, without extensive training. The team documented that the dogs could generalize the categories to new toys they had not previously labeled, indicating a capacity beyond simple word-object matching when it comes to categorizing objects by use.
The researchers say the dogs appear to form abstract categories based on function, much as humans see that a hammer and a rock can both drive a nail or that a mug and a glass can be grouped as cups. This functional labeling marks a step beyond perceptual similarity and points to a broader understanding of object use in dogs. While the exact cognitive mechanism remains unclear, the results suggest dogs may possess more advanced language-related skills than previously thought, even if they do not engage in conversation.
The study builds on a longer line of Hungarian research into canine cognition. In 2022, the same team found that dogs store multi-sensory mental images of their toys, remembering not only appearance but smell as well. A 2023 study examined spatial bias, noting that smarter breeds with sharper vision were more likely to attend to the object itself rather than pointing cues, a trait that brought dog cognition closer to human toddler-like processing. The new work adds another dimension by showing that some dogs can generalize functions to novel items, a finding that could have implications for how dogs learn and categorize the world around them.
Researchers caution that the ability may not be universal, and the study focused on the subset of dogs already identified as Gifted Word Learners. The next steps will involve testing whether average dogs—without prior label-learning histories—can generalize functions, and whether the phenomenon extends to other species. If so, functional concept learning could be more widespread than previously thought. In the meantime, Gaia, Whisky, Arya, and Gadget remain among the top dogs in canine cognition, illustrating that playtime can serve as serious science.