From Button Presses to Situated Communicative Events: CCR’s First Frontiers Article Is Now Live
Updated: Sep 29
Something important has happened for Canine Communication Research.
The abstract page of our Frontiers article is now live:
From Button Presses to Situated Communicative Events: A methodological framework for canine Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) research under interpretive uncertainty
The article has been accepted in Frontiers in Animal Science, in the section Animal Welfare and Policy, as a Hypothesis and Theory contribution. The final formatted version is still forthcoming, but the abstract, DOI, keywords, and article page are now public.
For CCR, this is a major step.
Not because the article claims that dogs “talk like humans.” It does not.
Not because it proves that every soundboard press has semantic meaning. It does not.
And not because it turns canine communication into a spectacle. That is precisely what the paper tries to avoid.
The article proposes a methodological middle path between two bad extremes: uncritical celebration of “talking dogs” on one side, and reflexive dismissal of soundboard use on the other.
The central idea is simple but important:
the unit of analysis should not be the isolated button press.
A button press alone is too poor a unit. It tells us that a button was activated, but not what kind of event happened.
The real unit should be the situated communicative event: the press together with the dog’s body orientation, gaze, prior activity, environmental context, human response, interaction history, ambiguity, non-use, and possible later disconfirmation.
In other words, the question is not only:
Which button did the dog press?
The better question is:
What happened, around whom, in what context, with what behavioural follow-up, and what alternative explanation must still be considered?
This is the same spirit that guides our work at CCR / Haverim keLev.
When Pretty presses a button, we do not want to jump too quickly to a magical interpretation. But we also do not want to dismiss the event before we have looked at the context.
When Lilly becomes anxious because boxes are being moved, or because old jackets bring back associations with Papa, there may be no button at all — but the communication problem is still there.
When Elvis adjusts from full night barking to something closer to a whisper-bark, that too is communication under negotiation.
The paper therefore belongs to a wider CCR project: learning how to observe dogs without either exaggerating or erasing what they are doing.
The article sets out several methodological commitments:
treating ambiguity as data, not as failure;
recording negative observations and non-use;
pairing each candidate interpretation with a counter-interpretation;
using confidence levels instead of overclaiming;
making first-person household observation compatible with third-person review;
protecting welfare and voluntary participation;
using AI video coding only as support, not as a replacement for human interpretation;
specifying what evidence would count against the framework.
This last point matters. A serious framework must be able to say how it could be wrong.
That is one of the main differences between research and storytelling.
What does it mean for CCR?
At CCR, we love stories. We tell them, draw them, and sometimes even issue ceremonial diplomas to tiny senior dogs who have successfully negotiated cleanliness treaties under the supervision of sausage diplomacy.
But behind the humour is a methodological commitment: the story must remain open to correction by observation.
This Frontiers article is therefore not the end of the work. It is the beginning of a more formal research path.
The next steps are clear:
continue documenting naturalistic canine communication at Haverim;
develop prospective observation protocols;
distinguish clearly between anecdote, field note, case study, and evidence;
build tools that allow owners, researchers, and reviewers to speak more carefully about what dogs may be doing;
keep welfare, humility, and interpretive discipline at the centre.
For me personally, this publication is also a moment of gratitude.
The manuscript benefited from rigorous peer review, especially around purpose, structure, cultural context, interspecies pragmatics, negative observations, and the need to avoid overclaiming. The final article is stronger because of that process.
It also reflects the daily work of living with dogs not as machines, not as children, not as props, but as intelligent companions whose behaviour deserves careful attention.
The article does not say: “dogs speak.”
It says something more modest, and perhaps more useful:
if we want to study canine soundboard communication seriously, we must stop treating the button press as if it were the whole event.
Between signal and meaning, there is a space.
That space is where the dog acts, the human interprets, the context matters, and the evidence must remain open to revision.
That is the space CCR is trying to study.
The now live, final formatted article : https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/animal-science/articles/10.3389/fanim.2026.1907975/full
A small button has become a serious methodological question.
And for CCR, that is a very good beginning.
Pretty’s field notes and early soundboard journey are also available in The Adventures of Pretty, a narrative companion to the CCR project.
Then you have also :
Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com.be/dp/B0F8MWM96C
CCR newsletter: https://www.caninecommunicationresearch.org/blog.
“Book a CCR consultation” - contact us
“Follow the research”: article (original) - https://zenodo.org/records/20077722
“Support Life-X / CCR” - IBAN: BE17 3632 1790 8621 - Ajinomatrix SRL
Comments