(ORDO NEWS) — American scientists have learned that our tailed friends can be taught to repeat the experience of their recent past. For example, ask again to tilt your head to the side cutely to take a picture.
But the main thing is that the dogs, as it turned out, reproduce this consciously and understand what exactly they were doing recently.
It is known that dogs are able to partially understand human speech (and in different languages ) and isolate individual words from the general flow of sentences, recognize the owner by voice, yearn for dead relatives and recognize human lies.
Our four-legged friends are programmed to communicate with people from birth and may even suffer from a behavioral disorder similar to a human.
Dog owners also know how difficult it is sometimes to photograph a fidget, and even more so to capture some of his cute antics on camera. For example, head tilt (by the way, we wrote about why dogs turn their heads to one side here ).
Scientists from the University of Buffalo (USA) have learned that four-legged brethren are able to “remember” the recent experience of their past and consciously reproduce it.
“We found that dogs can be trained to repeat certain actions on command. Thus, we found evidence that these animals are capable of forming abstract concepts, ”said one of the researchers, Ph.D. Allison Skagel.
This, whatever one may say, speaks of the cognitive abilities of dogs, which were not previously known.
After all, the conscious memory of past experience has always been considered the exclusive prerogative of people, great apes and bottlenose dolphins.
This means that dogs are able not only to remember and repeat the command of a person, but they can also understand the concept of repetition and realize that they must repeat their action again. True, only three dogs participated in the study – a male Chihuahua and two female golden retrievers.
First, scientists trained dogs to respond with certain behaviors to a particular signal. For example, walking in a circle around an object or lying down. The animals then learned a separate command – the word “again” followed by a hand gesture.
After this command was uttered, the dog had to reproduce the action that had just been performed. But the scientists went even further: with the help of the “again” command, they got the dogs to perform actions that were not learned, but which the animals performed involuntarily in the recent past. All subjects successfully completed the task.
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