It turns out humans and their dogs have more in common than typically believed.
According to researchers at Budapest’s MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, dogs, like people, possess the power to recall past events. The team confirmed the existence of episodic memory in dogs through a series of experiments in which the four-legged friends reacted to the movements of people.
In the first round of testing and analysis, 17 dogs were trained to mimic a human action upon hearing the command “Do it!” Once the canine group perfected that stage of the exercise, they were then encouraged to react to human movement by lying down. With those two training tasks complete, researchers moved on to assessing how well the dogs recalled what the person had done by giving the reclining dogs the “Do it!” command.
Though the canine subjects had absolutely no reason to commit the human actions to memory, they did and were able to mimic them upon being directed to act. Their episodic memories held in both the short and long terms, but did fade as time went on.
Said one of the researchers, “The results of our study can be considered as a further step to break down artificially erected barriers between non-human animals and humans.”
