Dogs can do more than tricks. They can be asked to “think back” on cue and ponder their past. In a new study published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, researchers found that dogs can do much more than understanding commands like “fetch the ball,” “sit,” and “roll over.” They can remember what they just did — and do it again.
Conscious awareness of past personal experiences has historically been the exclusive domain of humans. Now, some humans know better. “Our study shows that dogs have the ability to form concepts, placing them in an expanded category of other animals including bottlenose dolphins and chimpanzees,” said Allison Scagel, one of the study’s authors and a Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo. “ It’s the first evidence that dogs are capable of some kind of abstract conceptualization.”
How They Did It
Researchers looked at dogs’ memories of their recent actions. They determined if they could voluntarily think back to what they had just done in the recent past and reproduce those actions. They first trained the dogs to perform basic commands, such as “spin” or “lay down.”
Next up, researchers taught the pups a new cue. Eventually, that became the repeat cue: a combination of a hand gesture and a spoken word. Researchers added more actions to the training using the same repeat cue.
When the researchers gave the cue, the dogs would create actions by themselves and then look back on the same action.”They were still able to come up with something on their own, and then think back to that action and repeat it,” Scagel told Mashable. Scagel said that her dog, one of three in the study, walked to a stool and put his feet up. Another dog went over to a box and pulled it down with her paw. With repeat cues, they recollected these actions, and did it again and again. “Eventually, it kind of clicked for them that, ‘Oh, this can apply to anything I just did. And I’m supposed to repeat the last action that I performed,” said Scagel.
In case you’re wondering, the study’s participants were Todd, a long-haired male chihuahua, and two female golden retrievers, Aspen, belonging to an acquaintance of Scagel’s, and Layla, belonging to Scagel’s co-author, Eduardo Mercado III, a University of Buffalo professor of psychology.
Because this study shows that dogs can understand the concept of repetition and they can do more comprehend the relationship between a person’s cues and which particular trick they should perform, it offers new flexible training possibilities for dogs.
