Posted on 03/02/2015 10:55:47 AM PST by Red Badger
Dogs Don't Remember: Episodic Memory May Distinguish Humans
Dogs are wonderful creatures. Our dogs recognize me and are always happy to see me. Dogs are also smart and successful creatures. Our dogs have learned several cute tricks. But dogs (and other non-human animals) are missing something we take for granted: episodic memory. Dogs don't remember what happened yesterday and don't plan for tomorrow.
In defining episodic memory, Endel Tulving argued that it is unique to humans. Experience influences all animals. Most mammals and birds can build complex sets of knowledge or semantic memory. You and I also remember the experience of learning these complex sets of information. Dogs don't.
Episodic remembering is mental time travel and depends on a few crucial cognitive capabilities. First, in order to experience episodic remembering, an individual must have a sense of self. Most non-human animals have a dramatically different experience of self than we do. For example, most animals (and young humans) fail to identify themselves in mirrors. If I look in a mirror and see that I have something stuck between my teeth, I try to correct the problem. (I also wonder why my friends didn't tell me I had something stuck between my teeth.) In contrast, put a red dot on a child's forehead, put the child in front of a mirror, and watch what happens. Young children are more likely to reach for the baby in the mirror than for their own foreheads. Dogs treat the dog in the mirror as another dog; not as themselves. Most animals fail at the red dot mirror task.
A self concept is not, however, enough to ensure episodic remembering. Mental time travel is the other critical cognitive capability. I understand that yesterday is different from today and that tomorrow will be different as well. We realize that when we remember, the mental experience is a disjointed slice of time. Thus episodic remembering is the combination of a self concept and mental time travel: recollecting the self in that other time period. Mental time travel also enables planning for the future. Dogs don't plan for particular future events although they have a general expectation of when dinner will appear.
Tulving also argued that since episodic memory in a recent evolutionary development, it is particularly likely to suffer damage and loss. Anterograde amnesia is the failure to encode and remember new episodic memories. Anterograde amnesiacs can learn from single experiences without recollecting the experience. They retain a clear sense of self, but they have difficulty with time as personally experienced. Because they lack episodic memory, they can't recall what occurred just before the present moment and constantly feel like they just woke up. If you meet an anterograde amnesiac, leave the room, and return after 10 minutes, you'll remember having met the individual, but the amnesiac won't remember having met you.
My dogs display this particular failure of episodic remembering. If I walk into the backyard, the dogs are overjoyed to see me and act like they haven't seen me for days. If I stay in the backyard, they quickly become bored with me. If I go inside and return after 10-15 minutes, my dogs are overjoyed to see me and act like they haven't seen me in days. They don't remember that I was in the backyard just a few minutes ago.
Arguing against Tulving's notion that episodic remembering is unique to humans is hard. Showing the impact of a single experience is not enough. Even without episodic memory, humans can show the impact of single events. Anterograde amnesiacs can learn fear, learn new skills, and gain new conceptual knowledge. Normal humans also gain knowledge without remembering when and where they learned the information (see my earlier post on Haven't I Seen You Somewhere Before).
Although I appreciate Tulving's conception of episodic memory, I've always been troubled by the difficulty of documenting that other animals have episodic memory. Episodic remembering hinges on the conscious experience of the self in some other time and place. Episodic memory is thus hard to demonstrate without the verbal ability to describe conscious experience.
Nonetheless, in a recent edited volume (The Missing Link in Cognition: Origins of Self Reflective Consciousness, edited by Terrance and Metcalf), several individuals have taken up the challenge. In my next post, I'll present the counter-argument: Dogs don't remember, but maybe chimps do. Since some non-human primates can perform self recognition with mirrors, they may perform episodic remembering. Even if they can't describe their memories, chimps may engage in mental time travel. My dogs, however, are stuck in an eternal present.
Ira E. Hyman, Jr., Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at Western Washington University.
This is a false conclusion. Dogs know the reflection in the mirror is not another dog because it has no scent. Everything alive has a scent.
-PJ
Hey old Red, you are getting a little white around the muzzle there. What this article can’t evaluate is the hundreds of smells that dogs remember, often detecting no more than 1 ppb in the air. Dogs are really man’s best friend. Even if you don’t love them, they will still love you Red, even with all your faults, which they will completely ignore.
Never to attempt a change to a hungry cat's dinner schedule. Change the meal time instead.
I have to question the mirror being the proof of self knowledge. Not understanding reflection in a mirror is a bad test. As for memory, their memories are probably based on smell. When going to our home town my dog got excited about a mile from my mother’s and did the same at another town we had lived in for only a year. If you are going to test a dog, gear the test to the dogs mind and senses.
Not many psychologists look at life from the Creator’s point of view either. Man is fallen, animals are under a curse. The Garden of Eden was paradise and Jesus should be the standard of all human tests in my opinion, but what do I know. I know after the Messiah frees the world and it is once again under God’s control psych testing as we know it will be null and void.
I have read before that it is a deep seeded psychological function. Humans instinctively think in terms of the past and future and dogs instinctively think in terms of the present. They seem to lack in innate ability to think at all about what is going to happen tomorrow or what happened yesterday and their brains are wholly focused on right now. Sometimes I think that is something humans can very much learn from and indeed sometimes it is something they much need to learn from.
And excuses for more great canine pics are always welcome regardless of the discussion at hand.
In fact, dogs may be better at remembering and learning than many humans.
The writer is obviously not a dog person. I doubt if they ever owned one.
“My dogs know exactly what time dinner occurs, within minutes. Horses, cats, goats, and cattle do as well. Only the switch to daylight savings time trips them up. Don’t mess with dinner time. “
Funny. I started leaving food out at night for some raccoons, since I saw them eating from our cat’s bowl.
Now, every night at 6:30pm they are waiting for me on the porch. I feel like dr. Doolittle. They walk in front of the door and look in if I am late.
Dogs not only remember past events, they understand abstractions to a degree. Almost any dog will learn if you point in a direction to look in that direction. Most other animals just look at your finger if you use it to point. Understanding the meaning of pointing toward an object involves abstract thinking.
My dog always looks away. She is not willing to accept the fact that she is a dog.
Every animal on TV is real to her, though. She thinks the screen is a window to the side yard, and always runs out the back door and around to attack the elephants or giraffes she just saw there. :)
Dr. Ivan Pavlov, please pick up the white courtesy phone.
blurbsp!!!
There went my lunch...
(good one 8^))
Our golden retreivers remember places we haven’t for a year at a time, so I don’t buy the whole they don’t remember. We have a boat and after being away from it for four or five months, they hop out of the car when we get to the marina and walk down the dock and hop on the boat like it was yesterday.
I don’t believe this theory is correct because I have seen dogs have a concept of time. I had a dog that would great me differently depending on how long I had been away. If I had just come back from a semester of college, I he would whine and whine about how long I had been gone. Whereas when I bought a house nearby and would come and visit my folks every few weeks I would get a nice greeting but nothing like when I had been gone for months. That dog also learned routines so he didn’t get very excited at all when some of my siblings came home from college on the weekends because that was their normal routine.
At one time I had 3 cars and 3 sets of keys. Depending which set of keys I grabbed, my dog would instantly run to the front door, or the rear door, or not even move if I grabbed the keys to the nice car.
My dog knows what going in the car means. He gets excited and runs to the car every time I ask him to go for a ride. I only take him in the car five or six times a year but he remembers. He also remembers the people he doesn’t like. My sister in law teased him as a puppy and he never liked or trusted her.
That is a very good point; I agree they can understand abstractions to a point. I don’t believe trainers/breeders understand what intelligence means when they discuss “intelligent breeds” (they see it as ability to train, not capacity for abstract thought), but I have always thought the breeds closest to wolves have the greatest capacity for abstract thought. My smartest, a Chow Chow, could understand words contextually to a point. I once came home from a business trip, and she angrily grabbed my socks and started shaking them. I sarcastically said, “After being gone so long you are just going to get pissed and shake my socks? The least you could do is make yourself useful and fetch my slippers”. She had never been trained to fetch, and would never do what she was told at any rate, and had never been explicitly told what slippers were, but with a gleam in her eye, she dropped the socks and ran off and got a slipper from under the bed and dropped it at my feet, as I stood utterly amazed and dumbfounded. I’d swear she was smirking as she did it.
Positive and negative reinforcement worked with my dogs to alter their behavior or to learn tricks. I don’t think this would work if dogs had no memory.
If I say “roll over” and it’s a command my dog knows and he also knows comes the trick comes with a treat upon completion from day to day, this dog is remembering what roll over means and he’s looking for his treat when he obeys the order from what he learned in the past.
My Chihuahua knows MY keys VS My WIFE’S keys.
I shake MY keys, she is in the bedroom at the other end of the house, there is no response.
My wife shakes HER keys and she comes running because she knows she gets to go!..............................
Not buying. Our pup had just walked out on the deck to head downstairs to do his business when a gust of wind came of nowhere and slammed our glass topped table into the house ans shattered it. Pup wouldn’t go out on the deck for months and even now after a full year, he still looks at the table with his tail between his legs. He damned sure does remember the incident.
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