Can our pets tell us what they are thinking? with Federico Rossano
May 17 2025, 16:00 GMT / 12:00 EDT / 9:00 PDT (4pm GMT/ 12pm EST/ 9am PST)
Can our pets tell us what they are thinking?
In the 20th century, several scholars believed that training animals to learn and use human language would provide an unprecedented window into their minds and language evolution.
In this talk, Dr. Federico Rossano will report on how his team has addressed some of the methodological concerns associated with previous Animal Language studies in an ongoing study with thousands of dogs and hundreds of cats from 47 countries trained with an augmented interspecies communication (AIC) device composed of buttons that, when pressed, reproduce prerecorded human words or phrases.
He will report on findings from longitudinal observational and experimental studies to highlight how dogs and cats are learning to use these devices, to what degree they use them to communicate, and how they combine multiple buttons for more complex meanings. Ultimately, Dr. Rossano will discuss the potential and limitations of this approach for animal cognition and interspecies communication.
About the speaker
Federico Rossano is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and has worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany). His research adopts a comparative perspective on social cognition (cross-ages, cross-cultures and cross-species) and focuses on the development of communicative abilities and the structure of social interaction in human and non-human animals (e.g., non-human primates, dogs and cats).
