The FluentPet System combines ideas from speech language pathology and cognitive science to design arrangements that help you and your dog (or 'learner,' as we call them) communicate and remember word locations.

While it’s still too early to provide scientific proof of the effectiveness of this approach, our expertise in cognitive science and years designing teaching tools for dogs has lead us to believe that our HexTile organization method is likely to be significantly easier to remember, for any learner, than sound buttons organized in a plain square grid. By grouping buttons in categories, learners can locate buttons first more generally, and then more specifically.

In the case of larger dogs (and paws!), we recommend not filling each HexTile button space—instead, leave spaces between buttons until your learner gets more comfortable and precise with their button presses. By having a more sparse distribution of buttons, you simplify button organization for your learner, much like how children learning to write start with extra-wide lines before moving to narrower ones as their skill develops.

FluentPet’s ideograms have been designed to be visually unique and distinguishable by learners and human teachers alike. Note that since we don’t expect most learners to be able to immediately recognize or understand an ideogram simply from its appearance, our focus has been to make them easy to tell apart from each other. For this reason, we’ve varied our designs in several ways, such as in form, layout, and visual spatial frequency.

As the soundboard increased (and the learner’s vocabulary with it), users found that patterned HexTiles, when full, caused parts of the board to visually blend together, which became spacially challenging for our learners. Instead, we discovered that solid color tiles provided better and striking visual location cues.

What seems now to be the case is that learners are using the overall spatial organization of buttons and HexTiles to remember button identity (like how you or I might remember where the keys are on a keyboard). In spatial cognition, the easier it is to locate landmarks and boundaries, the easier it is to orient and navigate within a space. One common way we organize things around us is by creating and visually distinguishing different groups. For instance, on a map, you'll often see different regions or countries having different colors.

Similarly, placing words of the same category against solid color backgrounds makes it easier for a learner to remember button locations and improves the probability that they will recognize the words belong to a common group. Our goal with the solid color HexTiles was to make them distinguishable by those with dichromatic vision (as opposed to the trichromatic vision that most of us humans have). Dogs can see color, but they have roughly the color vision of someone with red-green color blindness. We chose this set of colors to make it easier for both humans and dogs to differentiate one from the other. Here you can see them as they appear on the FluentPet Connect faceplates:

We can approximate how they'd look to a dichromat by using Coblis, a color blindness simulator. In our case, that means dogs and cats would probably see something closer to this:

While some of the HexTiles are visually somewhat close (e.g. those that were previously red and green, or yellow and orange), they are still distinguishable by how light or dark they are.

Our hope is that solid color HexTiles will make it easier for learners to remember how things are organized—not so much by making individual HexTiles easier to recognize, but instead through color groupings, to create identifiable boundaries so that learners may recognize and orient themselves on their own.