Dogs are even smarter than we thought

Anyone who’s ever had experience with dog training can attest to the fact that our canine friends are awfully smart — especially when it comes to getting a treat. But just recently, researchers showed with a surprisingly simple experiment that their cognitive abilities could be even greater than expected.

Traditionally, canine education is based on a repertoire of very specific commands, and sufficiently distinct from each other. This greatly facilitates learning, because it allows the dog to associate these combinations of sounds with a specific action.

Thanks to this training, the dog can understand what is expected of him and repeat the action even when the conditions change slightly; for example, when told to “ look for the ball he will probably be able to figure it out even if his master gives him the same order with two different balls.

An order that uses memory and depends on the context

But in the work of these researchers, the situation is quite different. They started by training the dogs with a standard set of commands, like “ turned ” Where ” lying “. The two authors then managed to teach them an order that tells them to reproduce the last action performed.

Against all odds, they found that their four-legged friends had all managed to assimilate this concept. But above all, they even showed themselves capable of reproduce actions that did not correspond to a precise and already known order. For example, during the study, one of the dogs put its front paws on a stool; a behavior not taught by his masters, and which corresponded to no order. When his masters told him to do it again, the animal complied without being asked.

This suggests that the dog has truly assimilated the concept of repetition, and not just the link between a command and a specific action. This order is entirely context-dependent; the action associated with this same command changes each time. And that makes this experience very interesting. Because even if it sounds like a trick like any other, the implications are actually much deeper than it seems.

A proof of abstract conceptualization?

Indeed, this suggests that dogs exhibit an ability to abstract conceptualization. Very briefly, this term refers to the ability to build reasoning and extrapolate from a specific example. Cognitively speaking, it is a much more complex phenomenon than simply following an order.

This implies that the dog is also able to analyze its own experiences and reason from these elements to adapt to a new context by constructing relatively elaborate causal relationships.

We can quite imagine that some masters have already succeeded in teaching this concept to their companion in the past. But until now, no scientific study has yet strictly documented this phenomenon in dogs. In fact, if we ignore humans, they have only been in one mammal: the dolphin.

A new avenue of research for animal cognition

And that’s great news for researchers. Because if the way in which animals conceive and represent these abstract concepts is still poorly understood, it is also very difficult to study it. We know, for example, that dolphins — the only mammals in which this ability has been confirmed — tend to be deeply unhappy in captivity. It is therefore not a good subject of study, and this psychological distress could in any case distort the results.

Dogs, on the other hand, are very much like perfect guinea pigs. Not only do they already live in contact with humans, but in addition, many races actively claim to be intellectually stimulated and treat learning like a game. This could allow to combine business with pleasure by imagining new playful experiences to study abstraction in dogs, then in mammals in general.

” This is an important step towards a better understanding of how these species form these abstract concepts “, explain the authors. There is still a long way to go to understand all the ins and outs of this process, but the more research advances, the less the human seems unique from a cognitive point of view.

The text of the study is available here.