Dogs Remember What You Do, Even When They Aren't Supposed To

by MAGGIE FOX

Anyone who has been around a dog for long knows they can understand human language and that they watch our every move - especially when food is involved.

But a new study shows they have a whole level of complex memory that's never been proven before to exist in animals other than humans.

"The results of our study can be considered as a further step to break down artificially erected barriers between non-human animals and humans," Claudia Fugazza of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, said in a statement.

Smart Dog study. Claudia Fugazza / MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group

"Dogs are among the few species that people consider 'clever', and yet we are still surprised whenever a study reveals that dogs and their owners may share some mental abilities despite our distant evolutionary relationship."

The team was looking for evidence of episodic memory - which is an orderly memory of events, usually associated with self-awareness.

It took some tricky training to make sure the dogs weren't just trying to please.

"Dogs were first trained to imitate human actions on command," Fugazza's team wrote in their report, published in Current Biology.

Then they were trained to simply lie down after any command. The idea was to trick the dogs into forgetting that they had been trained to imitate the trainer.

"We then tested whether dogs recalled the demonstrated actions by unexpectedly giving them the command to imitate, instead of lying down."

So for instance, a trainer would tap an open umbrella, then take the dog behind a screen for a while, return the dog to the room, where it would lie down. Then the trainer would give the unexpected command "Do it."

Many, but not all of the dogs would repeat the action -- walking up to the umbrella and tapping it with a paw. There's a video of one experiment here.

Episodic-like memory in dogs (canis familiaris): Recall of others' actions after incidental encoding revealed by the do as I do method. Credit: Claudia Fugazza, Ákos Pogány, and Ádám Miklós / Current Biology 2016. Link to Paper: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/f...


Even though the dogs could not have been expecting that they would be asked to imitate a trainer's actions, they could. The actions were odd, such as hitting an umbrella or walking around a bucket, so the dogs had to have remembered what the people did, the researchers said.

"These findings show that dogs recall past events as complex as human actions even if they do not expect the memory test, providing evidence for episodic-like memory," the team concluded.

So be careful what you do in front of your dog.

Study finds evidence that dogs have episodic memory

BY THE WASHINGTON POST | Thursday, Nov. 24, 2016, 11:00 p.m.

 


Do you remember what you did last year on Thanksgiving? If so, that's your episodic memory at work — you're remembering an experience that happened at a particular time, in a particular place, maybe with particular people, and probably involving particular emotions.

Humans have episodic memory, and that's pretty easy to prove, because we can use our words to describe the past events we recall. Demonstrating that animals have it is much more difficult.

But now researchers in Hungary say they've found evidence that dogs have episodic-like memory (they added the “like” because they acknowledge they cannot get inside a dog's head to absolutely confirm this), specifically when it comes to remembering what their owners do. Even more interesting is that they can remember these things even when they don't know they'll have to remember them.

To determine this, the researchers put 17 pet dogs through a multistep training process designed to first make them memorize an action, then trick them into thinking they wouldn't need to do it. The dogs' performance was described in a study published in Current Biology.

First the dogs were trained in what is known as the “do as I do” method. It involves a dog's owner demonstrating an action — say, touching a traffic cone or an umbrella — and then telling the dog to “Do it!” The pups' successful imitations were rewarded by treats. Once they had mastered that trick, the owners switched things up on them. They performed an action, but instead of asking the dogs to imitate it, the humans told the pets to lie down. After several rounds of that, all the dogs eventually were lying down spontaneously — a sign, the authors wrote, that they'd lost any expectation that they were going to be told to imitate, or “Do it!”

“We cannot directly investigate what is in the dog's mind,” said lead author Claudia Fugazza, an ethologist at the University of Eotvos Lorand in Budapest. “So we have to find behavioral evidence of what they expect or not.”

Next, the owners switched things up on the dogs yet again. They'd do the action, and the dogs would lie down, and then the humans would totally violate the poor pooches' expectations by waiting one minute and saying, “Do it!” The owners made the same command after waiting an interval of one hour.

This was the test: Had the dogs tucked the memory of their owners' actions somewhere in their mind, and could they dig it out?

After the one-minute interval, about 60 percent of the dogs imitated the human action, even though they probably didn't expect to be asked to. After the one-hour wait, about 35 percent imitated the action.

“What's lovely about the study is the way it shows dogs remembering an action that they'd seen at a later time — without doing it themselves,” Alexandra Horowitz, who runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard, wrote in an email. “It speaks to what might be on their mind: that they are remembering episodes that they witness, not just things that they are the subjects of.”

Fugazza and colleagues had previously carried out a variation on this study that didn't involve messing with the dogs' expectations. In that one, the dogs were not taught to lie down, but just to “Do it!” — which the researchers say means the dogs expected to be told to imitate. The canine participants in that study aced that test, with nearly all imitating the human actions even after a one-hour delay.

The dogs' much lower success in the current study “also suggests they were really using their episodic-like memory, because episodic memory in humans is known to decay faster, too,” Fugazza said.