They make mental images of the objects they know, according to a study by the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest
An investigation reveals that dogs can have ideas of the toys they know and that they are able to recognize them among many objects, either in the light or in the dark, thanks to that mental image.
Researchers at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest have shown that dogs have a “multisensory mental image” of the objects they know.
That means that, by “thinking & rdquor; In an object, dogs imagine its different sensory characteristics, such as what it looks like or smells like.
The group of scientists found that the senses that dogs use to identify objects, such as their toys, reflect the way in which the objects are represented in their “minds.”
In a previous study, published last year in the journal Royal Society Open Science, this same team of researchers found that only a few exceptionally gifted dogs can learn up to 12 words in a week and remember them for months. They learn at rates similar to those of 1-year-old human babies.
gifted dogs
They are called dogs Gifted Word Learners (GWL) and exhibit cognitive abilities functionally similar to those of human infants. They associate objects with words and can have a vocabulary that exceeds 100 terms.
This first investigation was carried out with six GWL qualified dogs, all border collies, a kind of Scottish shepherd, with an average age of 3.6 years and an average vocabulary of 26 words. The three males and three females came from the United States, Brazil, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway and Hungary.
The researchers sent each dog’s owner a box containing six new toys. The owners then had six days to teach their dogs the names of the toys using their usual methods.
After one week, all dogs successfully retrieved at least five of the six new toys. The team then shipped a second box with 12 new toys and repeated the process. All of the dogs successfully retrieved at least 11 of the toys, just by association with the word assigned by their owners.
New “thought & rdquor;
The new experiment also had two parts and featured two groups of dogs: three of them GWLs and another 10 unfamiliar with the names of their toys. Everyone had to look for a toy camouflaged among other objects, both with the lights on and off. And they were trained to find the right one through rewards.
Once the training was over, the researchers observed that all the dogs found the camouflaged toys, both in light and in the dark, without major difficulties. Learning was effective in both types of dogs.
In a second part of the experiment, the researchers were left with only the three GWL dogs: they had to find the camouflaged toys as well, but in this attempt by relating the search to their ability to learn words.
That is, they had to know which toy to find, in light and dark, not because they had learned it through a reward mechanism, but only because of the word associated with the intended object.
It was the same experience as last year’s experiment, except for the novelty that this time they not only had to recognize a toy in relation to a word, but something a little more difficult: identify it in the midst of other toys presented as lures.
Mental image
In this second attempt, the GWL dogs were successful in selecting the toys named by their owners, despite being camouflaged with other deceptive toys not associated with any words.
According to the researchers, this means that dogs, when they hear the name of a toy, remember the different sensory characteristics of that object and can use this “multisensory mental image & rdquor; to identify it, also in the dark, among other lures.
“Dogs have a good sense of smell, but we found that they preferred to rely on vision and used their nose only a few times, and almost only when the lights were off,” he explains. Adam Miklosihead of the Ethology Department at ELTE University and co-author of the study, in a statement.
“The dogs sniffed more often and longer in the dark. They spent 90% more time sniffing when the lights were off, but even then, they needed only 20% of the search time,” she adds.
In conclusion, the success of dogs in finding toys and the different senses used while searching in the light and in the dark reveals that when dogs play with an object, even briefly, they pay attention to its different characteristics and that, using multiple senses, they record “mentally” the information and they make a mental idea of the toy that they like so much.
An experiment that anyone can repeat at home with their pet to see what happens, and perhaps discover that their dog also “thinks”.
Reference
Multisensory mental representation of objects in typical and Gifted Word Learner dogs. Shany Dror et al. Animal Cognition (2022). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-022-01639-z