![]() ![]() ^ "Spartanburg Community College's new 'Chasers' mascot encourages students to chase dreams".Talking birds, including a budgerigar named Puck.Kanzi, a bonobo who learned language through keyboard lexigrams.Koko, a gorilla who learned sign language.Rico, a border collie who was reported to understand over 200 words.Betsy, a border collie known to understand over 340 words.Ayumu, a chimpanzee who can remember number sequences better than university students.Alex, a grey parrot known for intelligent use of speech.She is buried with the other Pilley dogs, sprinkled with John Pilley's ashes." ĭeb Pilley Bianchi, who was involved in training and caring for Chaser, has completed a book which she and John Pilley were in the process of writing before he died. She had been doing really well and then a couple of weeks ago, she started going downhill very quickly. ![]() In a Facebook post, the family wrote a tribute to Chaser. A year later, on July 23, 2019, Chaser died from natural causes, at the age of 15 years, in her home in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Īfter Pilley's death, Chaser lived with Pilley's wife Sally, and their adult daughters, Deb Pilley Bianchi and Robin Pilley. He was recognized as both a professor and scientist for his research in canine cognition, the latest and most prominent example being with Chaser. Pilley died in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The two were also spotlighted in a 60 Minutes piece exploring canine intelligence that aired in 2014. Sharon Knolle in MoviePaws called it "a heartwarming celebration of these sweet animals and the people who make sure their last years are spent with a lot of love and comfort." The film premiered in March 2020 at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, and was released on DVD and pay-per-view in September 2020. In popular culture Ĭhaser and Professor Pilley were featured in the documentary film, Seniors: A Dogumentary, from director Gorman Bechard. Ĭhaser could also learn new words by "inferential reasoning by exclusion", that is, inferring the name of a new object by excluding objects whose names she already knew. Based on that learning, she and her owner and trainer Pilley continued her training, demonstrating her ability to understand sentences involving multiple elements of grammar, and to learn new behaviors by imitation. She recognized common nouns such as house, tree, and ball, as well as adverbs, verbs and prepositional objects. At this point, she became able to pair a novel object with a novel name in one trial, although rehearsal was necessary to log it into her long term memory. Ĭhaser began to understand that objects have names at five months of age. Pilley documents the following milestones as Chaser’s vocabulary grew over time: 50 words at 5 months, 200 words at 7.5 months, 700 words at 1.5 years, and 1,000+ at 3 years. Memory study Ĭhaser could identify and retrieve 1,022 toys by name, which was the result of a years-long research effort initiated by Pilley on June 28, 2004. Pilley, with the formal research published in Elsevier's journals Behavioural Processes and Learning and Motivation. She was taught by her owner, Wofford College Professor Emeritus of Psychology John W. She was bred by Wayne West at his Flint Hill Farms in Pauline, South Carolina. Background Ĭhaser had the largest tested memory of any non-human animal. In November 2021, Chaser was named the official mascot of Spartanburg Community College, the first mascot in the college's history. "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." "She came to me when she was eight weeks old and had been with us ever since", she said. Pilley's wife, Sally, had given Chaser to him as a 76th birthday present. Chaser could identify and retrieve 1,022 toys by name. Pilley spent that time training her in a formal research project. Pilley, at his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, from eight weeks old, until Pilley's death in June 2018. Chaser (Ap– July 23, 2019) was a Border Collie with the largest tested memory of any non-human animal. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |