Dogs recall a lot more than you think!
If you have a dog, chances are you have wondered if your beloved doggy can remember you or anything else for that matter.
What do dogs remember? Or can they remember anything at all? Read on…
Does your pet remember things you do together
For humans, the ability to consciously recall personal experiences and events is thought to be linked to self-awareness. It shapes how we think about the past—and how we predict the future.
Our memories contribute to how we understand ourselves and our experiences in the world. But because dogs aren’t verbal, it’s very hard for humans to understand whether they have a similar sense of self.
The 2016 study conducted at the Family Dog Project yielded great insights. It was conducted at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.
The study suggests that dogs share a type of episodic memory. And that the ability to recollect is more common in animals than previously thought.
Alexandra Horowitz, a dog cognition scientist at Barnard College in New York City, commented on the study. She wasn’t involved in it, but said it was a “creative approach to trying to capture what’s on a dog’s mind.”
The concept that nonhuman animals can consciously remember things they’ve done or seen in the past, is controversial. Most experts believe that Episodic memory doesn’t exist in animals because they aren’t self-aware.
But scientists have shown that some species do have “episodic-like” memories. Animals like Western scrub jays, hummingbirds, rats, and great apes have been observed to remember complex sequences. This has enhanced their ability to survive. For instance, the Western Scrub Jays; remember what food they’ve stashed; where and when. They can also recall who (if anyone) was watching at the time.
This leads us to ask a couple of questions.
- What occurs in an animal’s brain when it comes to events that are not strictly necessary for their survival?
- What do they think when an event doesn’t involve someone else’s actions?
The ‘Do as I Do’ Trick
To find out if dogs can remember such details, scientists asked 17 owners to teach their pets a trick called “do as I do.”
1. The dogs learned that after watching their owners jump in the air, they should do the same thing when commanded to “Do it!”
They trained the dogs to imitate human actions on command. But that alone did not prove episodic-like memory, so the testing continued.
2. In the next round of training, the owners taught their dogs to lie down after watching them do something different. Things like touching an umbrella or stepping up on a chair were used as signals. They were no longer required to imitate the same act performed by their owners, instead they were expected to lie down.
3. The owners then performed the different action, but this time after the dog laid down, the owner ordered, “Do it!”
That’s when the dog had to remember what action it had seen its owner do previously. That action was combined with the command it was being ordered to perform.
And this was done even though it had no expectation that it needed to recall the action.
The dogs were tested in this way both one minute and one hour after watching their owners.
a. Essentially, the dogs were first trained to imitate human actions on command.
b. Next, they were trained to perform a simple training exercise (lying down), irrespective of the previously demonstrated action.
So, they substituted the dogs’ expectation to imitate their owners with the expectation to lie down.
Amazingly, the dogs succeeded in 33 of 35 trials. This suggests that dogs have something similar to episodic memory. Although, the longer the dogs had to wait, the more trouble they had recalling the action, like human episodic memory.
The human memory fades at a faster rate when an event isn’t intentionally recorded. For example, you’re more likely to remember your first kiss than a hug last week from your spouse.
To break it down, the dogs were able to remember the “do as I do” trick, even when the owner performed a different trick, but their memory faded with time.
Acco