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........

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