Genius Dogs or Not?
A few dogs in the world have a special skill.
Updated January 19, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
When I give public talks about dogs and their cognitive abilities, there is one question that people always ask: "Are there breed differences in dog cognition ?" For instance, are German shepherds smarter than Labradors or poodles? My usual answer is, "Not really." Of course, there are significant differences between breeds in terms of motivation , temperament, and ability to learn new tricks. However, in general, all dogs perform well in some cognitive tasks, such as communicating with humans , and all dogs struggle with others, such as transposition tasks.
However, my answer is not entirely correct. There is a special talent found in only a few dogs. These dogs are sometimes called genius dogs or gifted word learners. We prefer to call them "label learners" because that's what they do: They learn the labels of objects. The first of these dogs to become famous in both the public and scientific worlds was the border collie Rico. He appeared on a German TV show after his owner claimed that he could recognise 200 objects by name. His task was to fetch the exact dog toy that people asked him to fetch from a pile of several toys. My colleague, Juliane Kaminski, investigated Rico's skills and found that he truly understood the concept of object labelling. To prove this, she let him fetch his toys from another room so that no one could give him a hint as to which toy was correct.
However, the biggest surprise was how Rico could learn the names of new toys. Until then, it had been assumed that his ability to learn by "fast mapping" was unique to children. In the test, eight of Rico's familiar toys were placed in a room, along with one toy he had never seen before. When the owners asked for a toy using a new, unfamiliar name, sure enough, Rico fetched the new and unfamiliar toy. He was able to associate the new word with the new object. In essence, Rico's approach was: “I know the names of the other toys, so this new word must belong to this new object.” These findings were very surprising and resulted in a science paper being published in 2004 (Kaminski et al., 2004).
Label learners are indeed special
It turned out that these dogs were extremely rare. Although many dog owners are ambitious , only a few dogs are able to learn that their toys have names. These dogs are indeed special and can learn hundreds of labels (Pilley et al., 2011). These dogs develop shape and texture biases, meaning they associate the meaning of words with the shape and texture of objects (Fugazza et al., 2024). They can even form a vocabulary of object labels by generalising these labels to items that share functional properties (Fugazza et al., 2025). Finally, they can also solve new tasks involving iconic signs, such as replicas and photographs. Rather than the owner saying the label to instruct the dog to fetch a particular object, in this test, the dogs were shown an iconic replica of the object while the owner gave a new command: "Bring me this." The label learners could solve this new problem (Kaminski et al., 2009).
Last week, about 20 years after the Rico study, label learners reappeared in the journal Science (surprisingly without any mention of the original study). The authors state that label learners can learn the names of new toys by overhearing their owners' conversations. Rather than teaching a new label to the dog, the owners presented the toy to a human family member and said the name of the toy to them. The dogs were then given access to the new toy. Some days later, the dogs were tested in the Rico setup with the new toy presented between known ones in another room. They proved that they had learned the new label by overhearing the conversation between two humans (Dror et al., 2026). While this is impressive, it is not so surprising given that previous studies have demonstrated the ability of these dogs to learn object labels indirectly.
But what makes these dogs special? Are the breed differences often assumed to be the reason? Many of the label learners are border collies. But not all of them; we also found a pug who could do it. What distinguishes these dogs from "normal" ones? To answer this question, we compared label learners with normal dogs (matched for age, sex , and breed) in eight cognitive tasks. We tested the dogs' curiosity, problem-solving skills, learning ability, memory , and ability to communicate with humans. We found that label learners exhibited three distinct traits: They were more curious, more focused with a specific interest in certain objects, and demonstrated greater self-control (Kaminski et al., 2025). But how do these skills lead to label learning? Could any motivated dog learn this with the correct training?
Dror, S., Miklósi, Á., Morvai, B., Năstase, A.-S., & Fugazza, C. (2026). Dogs with a large vocabulary of object labels learn new labels by overhearing like 1.5-year-old infants. Science, 391(6781), 160–163.
Fugazza, C., Jacques, E., Nostri, S., Kranzelic, U., Sommese, A., & Miklósi, Á. (2024). Shape and texture biases in dogs’ generalization of trained objects. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 28077.
Fugazza, C., Sommese, A., & Miklósi, Á. (2025). Dogs extend verbal labels for functional classification of objects. Current Biology, 35(19), 4820–4826.e4823. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.08.013
Kaminski, J., Capitain, S., Kühr, F., Nussbaum, C., & Bräuer, J. (2025). What makes a dog a label-learner: individual cognitive differences underlying label-learning abilities in domestic dogs ( Canis familiaris ). Scientific Reports, 15(1), 41616.
Kaminski, J., Tempelmann, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Domestic dogs comprehend human communication with iconic signs. Dev Sci, 12(6), 831–837.
Kaminski, J., Call, J., & Fischer, J. (2004). Word learning in a domestic dog: Evidence for "Fast Mapping." Science, 304(5677), 1682–1683.
Pilley, J. W., & Reid, A. K. (2011). Border Collie Comprehends Object Names as Verbal Referents. Behavioural Processes, 86(2), 184–195.
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Juliane Bräuer, Ph.D., is the head of the DogStudies Lab at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, where she studies the cognitive aspects of dog domestication.
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