A new study suggests that curiosity, focus, and self-control may be the secret traits that set genius dogs apart from others, a first step that researchers believe could lead to a puppy IQ test.

The University of Portsmouth's Dog Cognition Centre and the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena's Dog Studies Unit teamed up to study, for the first time, the characteristics that make a dog a label-learner, or canines that can recognize hundreds of objects by name alone. These types of dogs are "extremely rare," and they have an innate ability, researcher and professor Dr. Juliane Kaminski said in a statement .

The study, published in Nature Scientific Reports , examined 11 label-learning dogs from the United Kingdom, the United States, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany. The selec

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