“The owner is not a trainer,” Dr. Fugazza said. “He reported that Whisky attended a puppy course,” she added, “but she didn’t go on with training.” That’s another encouraging part of the story. So what if you didn’t get an M.F.A., you might still be able to write that novel.

Whisky learned the names of the objects in her cornucopia of fun by playing a game with her owners in which she would go fetch the toy they named. They played a lot. Dr. Fugazza and her colleague at the university, Adam Miklosi, wrote in the journal Scientific Reports that Whisky had 10 balls, seven rings, four ropes and four Frisbees. Since the names of the objects always included a specific adjective and general noun, like “small Frisbee,” Dr. Fugazza wanted to test if Whisky had gotten the idea of what a Frisbee was, and what a ball was, in a general, abstract way.

The way the experiment worked was that Dr. Fugazza went to Whisky’s home. In initial tests Whisky fetched most of her toys successfully. Then, for the category test, Dr. Fugazza would try her on four new toys at a time, first letting her play with the new toys with her owners in one test, or just explore them herself, in another test. Then Dr. Fugazza set the group of new toys in one room while she and the dog’s owners waited in the kitchen. One of the owners would ask Whisky to bring “a ball” or “a rope.”

She was successful about 50 percent of the time when she was given a chance to play with the new toys before the test. Given that she was choosing from four different items, that is much better than chance, Dr. Fugazza said.

Her achievement meant not only that she could group objects in categories in her mind, but also that she knew the words for those categories. While Dr. Fugazza suggests that all dogs have the ability to think in categories, only a select few, either because of training, or natural ability, actually know words for categories. And she had learned all that “naturally, in a way that is actually a little bit similar to what happens to human children,” Dr. Fugazza said.

Monique Udell, who studies dog behavior and cognition at Oregon State University, and who was not involved in the study, said that it’s hard to draw general conclusions from one dog. But, she said, “this study is an important reminder that animals are often learning from us even outside of formal training sessions.”

She said the work suggests that scientists should keep in mind the whole learning history of a dog when they use canines as test subjects. And dog owners might remember that “our animals may be learning more from us than we think.”