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Rico (dog)
Rico (December 13, 1994 – 2008) was a border collie dog who made the news after being studied by animal psychologists Juliane Kaminski and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig after his owners reported that he understood more than 200 simple words. Kaminski ''et al. ''wrote in ''Science'' that these claims were justified: Rico retrieved an average of 37 out of 40 items correctly. Rico could also remember items' names for four weeks after his last exposure. Testing and results Kaminski ''et al. ''eliminated the Clever Hans effect using a strict protocol: each of the 200 items whose names Rico knew was randomly assigned to one of 20 sets of 10 items. While the owner waited with the dog in a separate room, the experimenter arranged a set of items in the experimental room and then joined the owner and the dog. Next, the experimenter instructed the owner to request that the dog bring two randomly chosen items (one after the other) from ...
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Border Collie
The Border Collie is a Scottish breed of herding dog of medium size. Widely considered to be the most intelligent dog breed, they are descended from landrace sheepdogs once found all over the British Isles, but became standardised in the Anglo-Scottish border region. They are now mostly used as working dogs to herd livestock, specifically sheep. Border Collies are extremely energetic, acrobatic, and athletic. They frequently compete with great success in sheepdog trials and a range of dog sports like dog obedience, disc dog, herding and dog agility. Border Collies continue to be employed in their traditional work of herding livestock throughout the world and are kept as pets. Description In general, Border Collies are medium-sized dogs with a moderate amount of coat, which is more often thick and prone to shedding. They have a double coat that varies from smooth to rough and is occasionally curled. While black and white is the most commonly seen colour pattern of the B ...
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Semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science. History In English, the study of meaning in language has been known by many names that involve the Ancient Greek word (''sema'', "sign, mark, token"). In 1690, a Greek rendering of the term ''semiotics'', the interpretation of signs and symbols, finds an early allusion in John Locke's '' An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'': The third Branch may be called [''simeiotikí'', "semiotics"], or the Doctrine of Signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also , Logick. In 1831, the term is suggested for the third branch of division of knowledge akin to Locke; the "signs of our knowledge". In 1857, the term ''semasiology'' (borrowed from German ''Semasiologie'') is attested in Josiah W. Gibbs' ...
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Grey Parrot
The grey parrot (''Psittacus erithacus''), also known as the Congo grey parrot, Congo African grey parrot or African grey parrot, is an Old World parrot in the family Psittacidae. The Timneh parrot ''(Psittacus timneh)'' once was identified as a subspecies of the grey parrot, but has since been elevated to a full species. Taxonomy The grey parrot was formally described in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his ''Systema Naturae''. He placed it with all the other parrots in the genus ''Psittacus'' and coined the binomial name ''Psittacus erithacus''. Linnaeus erroneously specified the type locality as "Guinea": the locality was later designated as Ghana in West Africa. The genus name is Latin for "parrot". The specific epithet ''erithacus'' is Latin and is derived from the Ancient Greek εριθακος (''erithakos'') for an unknown bird that was said to mimic human sounds, perhaps the black redstart. The species is monotypic: no subspecie ...
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Alex (parrot)
Alex (May 1976 – 6 September 2007) was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. In her book "Alex & Me", Pepperberg describes her unique relationship with Alex and how Alex helped her understand animal minds. Alex was an acronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment. He was compared to Albert Einstein and at two years old was correctly answering questions made for six-year-olds. Before Pepperberg's work with Alex, it was widely believed in the scientific community that a large primate brain was needed to handle complex problems related to language and understanding; birds were not considered to be intelligent, as their only common use of communication was mimicking and repeating sounds to interact with each other. However, Alex's ac ...
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Sign Language
Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible, although there are also similarities among different sign languages. Linguists consider both spoken and signed communication to be types of natural language, meaning that both emerged through an abstract, protracted aging process and evolved over time without meticulous planning. Sign language should not be confused with body language, a type of nonverbal communication. Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages have developed as useful means of communication and form the core of local Deaf cultures. Although signing is used primarily by the deaf and hard of hear ...
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Gorilla
Gorillas are herbivorous, predominantly ground-dwelling great apes that inhabit the tropical forests of equatorial Africa. The genus ''Gorilla'' is divided into two species: the eastern gorilla and the western gorilla, and either four or five subspecies. The DNA of gorillas is highly similar to that of humans, from 95 to 99% depending on what is included, and they are the next closest living relatives to humans after chimpanzees and bonobos. Gorillas are the largest living primates, reaching heights between 1.25 and 1.8 metres, weights between 100 and 270 kg, and arm spans up to 2.6 metres, depending on species and sex. They tend to live in troops, with the leader being called a silverback. The Eastern gorilla is distinguished from the Western by darker fur colour and some other minor morphological differences. Gorillas tend to live 35–40 years in the wild. The oldest gorilla known is Fatou (b. 1957), who is still alive at the advanced age of 65 years. ...
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Koko (gorilla)
Hanabiko "Koko" (July 4, 1971 – June 19, 2018) was a female western lowland gorilla. Koko was born in San Francisco Zoo, and lived most of her life at The Gorilla Foundation's preserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The name , , is of Japanese origin and is a reference to her date of birth, the Fourth of July. Koko gained public attention upon a report of her having adopted a kitten as a pet and naming him "All Ball", which the public perceived as her ability to rhyme. Her instructor and caregiver, Francine Patterson, reported that Koko had an active vocabulary of more than 1,000 signs of what Patterson calls "Gorilla Sign Language" (GSL). This puts Koko's vocabulary at the same level as a three-year-old human. In contrast to other experiments attempting to teach sign language to non-human primates, Patterson simultaneously exposed Koko to spoken English from an early age. It was reported that Koko understood approximately 2,000 words of spoken English, in addition to the signs. K ...
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List Of Individual Dogs
This is a list of individual famous actual dogs; for famous dogs from fiction, see List of fictional dogs. Actors Advertising * Axelrod, Basset Hound, appeared in commercials and print ads for Flying "A" Service Station advertisements in the 1960s * Banjo, portrayed Alex, an Irish Setter/Golden Retriever mix and star of Stroh's beer advertising in the 1980s. Also mentioned in the Tone Lōc song, " Funky Cold Medina". * Cheeka, a Pug who appeared in the popular "You & I" advertising campaign of Hutch's cellular service in India, along with the child actor Jayaram * Gidget, a female Chihuahua, was featured in a Taco Bell advertising campaign as the "Taco Bell Chihuahua". She also played the role of Bruiser's mother in ''Legally Blonde 2''. * Honey Tree Evil Eye, a female Bull Terrier, was known as Spuds MacKenzie in her role as the Budweiser spokes-dog * Nipper, the dog with the gramophone in the HMV logo * Paddington, a Golden Retriever "professional stand-in, and ...
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Chaser (dog)
Chaser (April 28, 2004 – July 23, 2019) was a Border Collie with the largest tested memory of any non-human animal. Chaser worked with Professor John W. Pilley, at his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, from eight weeks old, until Pilley's death in June 2018. Pilley spent that time training her in a formal research project. Chaser could identify and retrieve 1,022 toys by name. Pilley's wife, Sally, had given Chaser to him as a 76th birthday present. "She came to me when she was eight weeks old and had been with us ever since", she said. "We were playing with her out in the front yard one day, and a red Jeep came flying past us and she went flying out after the car, so we decided to name her Chaser." In November 2021, Chaser was named the official mascot of Spartanburg Community College, the first mascot in the college's history. Background Chaser had the largest tested memory of any non-human animal. She was bred by Wayne West at his Flint Hill Farms in Pauline, South Caro ...
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Betsy (dog)
Betsy (born 2002) is a black and white longhaired Border Collie, credited with being one of the world's most intelligent dogs. Biography Betsy lives in Vienna, Austria with her owner, who goes by the pseudonym "''Schäfer''" ( en, Shepherd). Betsy is also a pseudonym given to her by animal cognition researchers. At ten weeks of age, Betsy was able to sit on command and knew numerous objects, such as a ball and set of keys, by their name and would fetch them on verbal command. Betsy was discovered after her owner answered a request by ''National Geographic Magazine'' to submit intelligent animals for study. Betsy was one of two dogs (both of which were Border Collies) whose intelligence was beyond that of Rico, also a Border Collie, who knows over 200 words. Betsy was featured on the cover of the March 2008 edition of ''National Geographic''. Intelligence Betsy has a vocabulary of more than 340 words, which rivals that of the great apes in terms of intelligence and lateral thin ...
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Nonlinguistic Sounds
Paralanguage, also known as vocalics, is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. It is sometimes defined as relating to nonphonemic properties only. Paralanguage may be expressed consciously or unconsciously. The study of paralanguage is known as paralinguistics and was invented by George L. Trager in the 1950s, while he was working at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State. His colleagues at the time included Henry Lee Smith, Charles F. Hockett (working with him on using descriptive linguistics as a model for paralanguage), Edward T. Hall developing proxemics, and Ray Birdwhistell developing kinesics. Trager published his conclusions in 1958, 1960 and 1961. His work has served as a basis for all later research, especially those investigating the relationship between paralanguage and culture (since paralanguage is learned, ...
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Understanding
Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to use concepts to model that object. Understanding is a relation between the knower and an object of understanding. Understanding implies abilities and dispositions with respect to an object of knowledge that are sufficient to support intelligent behavior. Understanding is often, though not always, related to learning concepts, and sometimes also the theory or theories associated with those concepts. However, a person may have a good ability to predict the behavior of an object, animal or system—and therefore may, in some sense, understand it—without necessarily being familiar with the concepts or theories associated with that object, animal, or system in their culture. They may have developed their own distinct concepts and theories, which may be equivalent, better or worse than the recognized standard concepts and theories of th ...
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