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.
My dog recognize several of the parks I take her to even when we haven’t been to them in months.
((BS))
I’m not so sure about that. When my golden retriever was just about a year or so old, my wife hid some rice at the bottom of her dog food bowl as a treat - ONE TIME! To this day, almost nine years later, every time she gets her food, she digs through the bowl with her nose and looks at the bottom to see if her treat is there this time.
Not my golden. If she gets mad at us for being gone too long and tears something up, we can tell when we walk in the door - she gets a guilty look before we even see what she did. As a matter of fact, that is usually what tells us we'd better go find out what she did...
My wife is and always has been terrified of snakes.
Her reaction to a snake is so rapid and so violent that I don't think there is any "remembering" going on. She recognizes that the object is a snake and the rest is on auto-pilot.
I think it is possible, though difficult to know, that some animals routinely operate on a similar principle. Recognizing a danger or associating a situation or object with potential pleasure doesn't necessarily require any conscious memory of why that association exists.
Dead has a pretty strong scent as well...............
Good one!.................
Yeh tell that to our Chihuahua Coco at 3:00PM everyday when she stretches jumps down off the couch and heads to the back door for midafternoon pee and treat. :-)
That’s those little wristwatches they have. LOL
My neighbor’s Chihuahua, Roach, loves to howl with the 5 o’clock whistle.
BS
LOL! One might begin to think dogs are holding back and "playing dumb". They're thinking, "If I show off too much, next thing you know, they'll want me to run the vacuum cleaner".
Our late Cocker Spaniel, Rufus, was a very sharp, intelligent dog.
Once by accident we had left him in the house and were gone too long. He knew that toileting on the run was wrong, so he used a cat box. The cats resented it, and would no longer use THAT cat box (we had five cat boxes). From then on, it was his, but that is besides the point BECAUSE no one taught him to use it in the first place. It was not learned behavior - he figured it out for himself.
Yes we do pack howl about once a week with ours. She can really howl too. We start doing and then she joins in. Its hysterical.
-PJ
Cats are soooo possessive.................
A beagle we used to have would let us know that he wanted to go out. He would stand at the front door waiting. Once when it was raining heavily, I opened the front door for him. He took one look then ran to the back door. There was logic in his thinking, but he didn’t understand that rain would naturally be going on in both places.
When mu daughter was in HS band she played trumpet.
When she would practice, our dog, Tigger, a mix mutt would start howling as long as she played......................
I disagree. Dogs are intelligent and do recognize us even when we don’t pay attention to them.
They do recall their own name and learned commands far more easily than humans who can’t recall what they had for lunch six months ago.
Don’t knock down man’s best friend.
I tell people that my dogs are unlike my ex-wives in that the later I come home at night, the happier my dogs are to see me.
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