Abstract:We investigated whether dogs remember their spontaneous past actions relying on episodic-like memory. Dogs were trained to repeat a small set of actions upon request. then we tested them on their ability to repeat other actions produced by themselves, including actions performed spontaneously in everyday situations. Dogs repeated their own actions after delays ranging from a few seconds to 1 hour, with their performance showing a decay typical of episodic memory. The combined evidence of representing own actio… Show more
“…In addition, owners may have behaved with their dogs in slightly different ways during exposure while applying the protocol at home and this may have affected the dogs' ability to learn, but it is unlikely that such small differences would have resulted in the failure of learning even only two toy-names of all naïve dogs but one in the naïve group and success in learning multiple toy-names of all dogs in the other group. Furthermore, training protocols applied by the owners at home are typically successful 35,37,38 . Consistently with our results, Ramos and Mills 35 showed that typical dogs could successfully learn commands for actions but not for objects.…”
Exceptional performance is present in various human activities but its origins are debated and challenging to study. We report evidence of exceptional performance and qualitative variation in learning object-names in dogs. 34 naïve family dogs and 6 knowledgeable individuals that knew multiple toy names, found in 2 years of search around the Globe, were exposed to 3 months of training to learn two novel toy-names and were tested in two-way choice tests. Only 1 naïve and all 6 knowledgeable dogs passed the tests. Additionally, only these dogs learned at least 10 new toy names over the 3 months, showing qualitative variation in this capacity. Although previous object-name knowledge could provide an explanation for the superior performance of the knowledgeable dogs, their rarity and the absence of previous training of this skill point to exceptional giftedness in these individuals, providing the basis to establish dogs as a model-species for studying talent.
“…In addition, owners may have behaved with their dogs in slightly different ways during exposure while applying the protocol at home and this may have affected the dogs' ability to learn, but it is unlikely that such small differences would have resulted in the failure of learning even only two toy-names of all naïve dogs but one in the naïve group and success in learning multiple toy-names of all dogs in the other group. Furthermore, training protocols applied by the owners at home are typically successful 35,37,38 . Consistently with our results, Ramos and Mills 35 showed that typical dogs could successfully learn commands for actions but not for objects.…”
Exceptional performance is present in various human activities but its origins are debated and challenging to study. We report evidence of exceptional performance and qualitative variation in learning object-names in dogs. 34 naïve family dogs and 6 knowledgeable individuals that knew multiple toy names, found in 2 years of search around the Globe, were exposed to 3 months of training to learn two novel toy-names and were tested in two-way choice tests. Only 1 naïve and all 6 knowledgeable dogs passed the tests. Additionally, only these dogs learned at least 10 new toy names over the 3 months, showing qualitative variation in this capacity. Although previous object-name knowledge could provide an explanation for the superior performance of the knowledgeable dogs, their rarity and the absence of previous training of this skill point to exceptional giftedness in these individuals, providing the basis to establish dogs as a model-species for studying talent.
“…This work suggests that dogs' representation of their body size extends beyond the olfactory modality [8] and past actions [7]. Prior research on self-representation, using the mirror-mark test, has found mixed results with non-humans, some of which may be due to problems resulting from adapting primate-centric cognitive paradigms to nonprimates [8].…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 81%
“…Research since the late 1990s has substantially broadened our understanding of the cognitive abilities of the domestic dog-in particular, how dogs perceive the world and interact with others. The greatest majority of research focuses on social cognitive abilities, such as gaze-and point-following [1,2] and use of others' attention [3,4]; other research Animals 2021, 11, 620 2 of 16 looks at the possible result of such social cognitive skill, such as perspective-taking [5,6] and representation of self [7]. Less well studied are the contributions of foundational perceptual abilities to cognition.…”
Very little research has focused on canines’ understanding of their own size, and their ability to apply this understanding to their surroundings. The current study tests domestic dogs’ judgment of their body size in relation to a changing environment in two novel experimental situations: when encountering an opening of decreasing height (Study 1) and when negotiating an opening when carrying a stick in their mouth (Study 2). We hypothesized that if dogs understand their own body size, they will accurately judge when an opening is too small for their body to fit through, showing longer latencies to approach the smaller openings and adjusting their body appropriately to get through—although this judgment may not extend to when their body size is effectively increased. In line with these hypotheses, we found that the latency for subjects to reach an aperture they could easily fit through was significantly shorter than to one which was almost too small to fit through. We also found that the order of subjects’ adjustments to negotiate an aperture was invariant across individuals, indicating that dogs’ perception of affordances to fit through an aperture is action-scaled. Preliminary results suggest that dogs’ approach behavior is different when a horizontal appendage is introduced, but that dogs were able to alter their behavior with experience. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that dogs understand their own body size and the affordances of their changing environment.
“…The ability to answer unexpected questions has been shown in mammals such as dogs ( Fugazza et al, 2020 ), rats ( Crystal, 2013 ), and non-human primates ( Menzel, 1999 ). As an example, rats trained to get a reward differently depending on whether they recently experienced food or not, can be randomly asked this question throughout normal foraging and exploration.…”
Section: Behavioral Abilities That Emerged In Early Mammalsmentioning
This paper presents 13 hypotheses regarding the specific behavioral abilities that emerged at key milestones during the 600-million-year phylogenetic history from early bilaterians to extant humans. The behavioral, intellectual, and cognitive faculties of humans are complex and varied: we have abilities as diverse as map-based navigation, theory of mind, counterfactual learning, episodic memory, and language. But these faculties, which emerge from the complex human brain, are likely to have evolved from simpler prototypes in the simpler brains of our ancestors. Understanding the order in which behavioral abilities evolved can shed light on how and why our brains evolved. To propose these hypotheses, I review the available data from comparative psychology and evolutionary neuroscience.
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