Posted on 11/28/2007 7:54:46 PM PST by blam
Dogs display aspects of human intelligence
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 6:01pm GMT 28/11/2007
Dog lovers have long claimed that their pets are smarter than many of us realise.
New evidence to back that view comes from research published today which concludes that, like us, our canine friends are able to form abstract concepts.
Friederike Range and colleagues from the University of Vienna, Austria, show for the first time that dogs are able to learn how to classify complex colour photographs and place them into categories in the same way that humans do.
Training stimuli: Images of dogs and landscapes are used to test dogs' recognition of abstract concepts
"Dogs were for a long time considered to be just pets - so showing that they are able to also form abstract concepts maybe gives their cognitive abilities more credit," she said.
However, the abstract concept they were able to grasp in this pioneering experiment was rather familiar, that of "dog."
The team reports in the journal Animal Cognition a clever way to show that the dogs are not picking up subtle signals from their handlers: the dogs successfully demonstrate their learning through the use of computer touch-screens, eliminating potential human influences.
Four dogs were shown both landscape and dog photographs simultaneously and were rewarded with food if they selected the dog picture on the touch screen.
Then they were shown a new set of dog and landscape pictures. They continued to reliably select the dog photographs, demonstrating that they could transfer their knowledge gained in the training phase to a new circumstance, even though they had never seen those particular pictures before.
In a second test, the dogs were faced with a choice between a new dog pasted on a familiar landscape and a completely new landscape with no dog, In this case, they reliably selected the landscape with the dog.
"These results show that the dogs were able to form a concept, that is 'dog', although the experiment cannot tell us whether they recognized the dog pictures as actual dogs," said Dr Range.
"Using touch-screen computers with dogs opens up a whole world of possibilities on how to test the cognitive abilities of dogs."
The dogs that took part were a Border Collie (Maggie), one Border Collie mix (Lucy), one Australian Shepherd (Bertl), and one mongrel (Todor). Two dogs were male (Bertl, Todor), two were female (Maggie, Lucy).
In earlier work, the team showed striking similarities between humans and dogs in the way they imitate others, showing they do more than copy. They also interpet what they see.
“factitious”?????
You are confusing difficult to train with dumb. They are mountain dogs from Afghanistan (hence the coat) and an ancient hunting breed related to the other sighthounds (greyhounds, borzois). They hunt at long range and independently, which is why they are independent. They are good at hunting independently because they are extremely intelligent. They are also stubborn and larcenous.
Because they are difficult to train, which is related to their independence and disinterest in whether or not their owner is pleased with how they do tricks, they are not a breed for everyone. Despite all they are extremely loyal and excellent guard dogs.
You are correct. Some breeds are smarter than others, generally speaking, and within any breed some dogs will be smarter than others. My Aussie Shepherd/Blue Heeler is very intelligent compared to other breeds as was my Blue Heeler/German Shepherd companion.
I have owned many dogs, and they were/are distinct personalities, if you will.
Of all the breeds I've had, Labs are not among them. I've had contact/second hand knowledge with them via friends and they are often quite a handful as pups but mature into to great dogs.
LOL We’ve resorted to spelling backwards or just saying the first few letters—as in the s-q’s are out there. Bath is a four letter word in our house. It never ceases to amaze me, they can play all day in the marsh—black mud and cold water, but a hot bath and soap is like acid! We have 3 rats/chi. They can read our minds, and it is fun to watch just how perceptive they are. Ours know that when my husband picks up the remote, something’s going to happen. Even if they’re dead asleep, if he picks up the remote, they all wake up and watch carefully. If he just changes the channel, they all sigh and go back to sleep. If he turns the tv off, they’re out of the den and down the hall in our bedroom before you can blink.
Good points.
My German Shepherd is very “special” - most of Tara’s life has been spent plying her with pills for her terrible allergies. She is so good, she gets up for me or my husband when she knows we’re getting the pills, and waits.
The funny thing is, we often vary what Tara gets, as the vet is always experimenting. E.g., recently she was changed drastically from many pills of several kinds a day, to 1 kind only once a day. (We ourselves are still not used to that!) So even at the 1 dosage, there was only 1 pill anymore, instead of 6 (requires generally 2 or 3 insertions). Tara seemed a bit confused at 1st that she wasn’t getting more than 1 time, and you had to release her until she was used to the new routine.
As for the lawn ornaments - this dog has always been suspicious of human-looking “ornaments” - especially at Halloween. While Tara loves humans, and normally on a walk she would only get excited and overly happy seeing a human on his lawn, she didn’t like the scarecrows and such put on lawns for Halloween. I don’t know why, but I guess she thought “something’s not right” - they looked like human forms, but didn’t have any life - so she would bark like a nut at them. For her, that’s weird because she is a lovey-dovey wimp who does not have good guard capabilities and wants to roll over for every (real) human. Tara may be “scared” by such weird incongruous things and barks in bewilderment, although she doesn’t act her typical scared (tail in legs, ears down, hunched back, etc).
I don’t know about that. I think AmerMother knows what she means, as she is around dogs alot.
I do not confuse “trainability” with real intelligence, myself. Ironically, German Shepherds are often called “very trainable” (and often called “very intelligent”), but in reality they tend to be stubborn and thus, a bit hard to train at 1st. They know what you want if you showed them, they just don’t want to do it unless they submit to you. But generally they ARE very intelligent, in the true sense.
My Shana took 50 times to make her submit to lying down on command, and my Tara (now) took 100 times. Everything else they obviously learned what was meant by the training, even if they weren’t quickly easy to make “perfect”. But the down is the hardest for stubborn dogs to do and boy did they show it.
Thanks anyway, but Tara was on that EVERY DAY at St. Bernard dosage for a German Shepherd, for several years until the doc pulled it this year to try something else (she also has anxiety/GI issues, so he was scared again that the Atopica would promote that problem). Extremely expensive at $10/day.
Yes, I’ve seen it all. Unfortunately, her allergies are rather intractable and she is always scratching and getting infections - although we keep on top of it enough that she really is a beautiful dog.
Never mind I already experienced alot thanks to my sister’s Shepherd years ago. He is why I knew where to go when it was obvious my GS was having itchy problems.
Interesting mix!
hey, that’s an insult to all great dogs out there.
Darn, I’m not allowed to see most pix here at work. Thanks for mentioning the breed so I know to look later.
Except that that is not what they were bred for. They are a very very old breed, pretty much the exclusive property of sheikhs in the middle east and used exclusively for hunting, with lineages like thoroughbred horses and kings. They were only very recently introduced to the West. Their principal "value" was working with hawks to hunt game. They were actually bred for speed, agility, endurance and the ability to talk down their prey.
My best story of true intelligence (not just getting used to a “routine”) was of my old Shepherd Shana (yes, I LOVE that dog and worship her! LOL).
She outwitted Border Collies in their very own home which she hardly knew at the time.
As a teenager we’d still periodically visit up at my uncle/aunt’s farm about 200 mi away. I’d had Shana maybe a year or 2 (and that age). My aunt had several Border Collies (yes, she’s a fancier) of working lines, including those she bred herself (the original 1 was born just ONE DAY after my Shana).
Her house floorplan was such that you could go all the way around the house in a nice rectangle pattern, 1 room to the next without oddball paths. 1 of the contiguous rooms still had the old farmhouse door on it that could close off the room. The door had panes like an outer door so was perfectly see-through. Bear in mind these Border Collies LIVED in this house for a year or more, whereas we only visited a few times and my German Shepherd was only allowed a limited time each time to visit (chaos with multi-dogs, you know).
My cousins and I were tossing toys from the kitchen through that doorway into the living room for each dog, 1 at a time generally (we didn’t want them getting in fights and let them all have turns), for them to retrieve and bring back. They all did this reliably.
Then my cousin decided to “tease” them and shut the door on them when they’d come back. We’d do the same thing otherwise. So each of his BCs would run off to find the toy and then come back to closed door. Each of them sat dejected, looking through, sitting down, dropping the toy.
Shana’s turn had her confront the closed door, stop a second, then she turned tail and ran through the rest of the house to get back to us in the kitchen! Guess she already knew there was another way!
Sorry, I wasn’t the 1 that wrote that sentence.
And I think she may be more referring to the CURRENT show dogs which really don’t do anything but show and be pets.
But some of her dogs seem quite eager to cooperate or to please (unlike your assertion) . . . they just can't figure out HOW. Unlike the cats, who DO understand but can't see any good reason why they should do what the human requests . . . .
A number of my friends own Nordic breeds, which are highly intelligent but difficult to train because they don't necessarily want to please -- and of course I see a lot of Chesapeake Bay Retrievers who are pretty much in the same boat, because they were originally bred as market hunters and to work independently of their handlers. I observe VERY different behavior from the Afghans than either of those two "hard headed" breeds.
My conclusion is that they're just not very bright. But that's o.k. as far as I'm concerned, so long as you can housebreak 'em. Plenty of dogs are TOO smart for their own good. Labs for instance . . . .
The smartest dogs with the most personality always hurt the worst to lose. My stupid Dalmation has been dead 11 years and I’m crying as I type this. Sorry about Shana. She sounds wonderful.
"Trainability" is not concurrent with intelligence, because (as you note) there also has to be the desire to please the owner, as well as a submission or 'softness' (or lack of hardheadedness, if you will).
Labs are generally very trainable as well as anxious to please, but (particularly dealing with stuff in which they figure they know more than you do - e.g. retrieving birds) there is a little hardheadedness or reluctance to submit. When I started teaching my older Lab to handle to a blind, she would stop on the whistle, but blow off my signals. You could tell she was thinking, "What!?! You think you know where the bird is, with your pitiful nose, from way over there?!?!? Who the heck is the bird dog here, anyway?"
Border collies always score tops on those 'intelligence' tests because they ARE very smart, plus they are very soft, anxious to please (and obsessive-compulsive workaholics). They can't ever shut it off, as a general rule, although a friend of mine who's gone to the Nationals in agility finally did find one who is a 'switch dog' - i.e. can switch it 'on' on the agility field but switch it 'off' in the house. Thank goodness.
I was referring to the current show dogs (which is what my friend has).
We have the same darned problem with the Labs that are bred for show -- with the emphasis on looks to the exclusion of all else, they are losing their ability to hunt.
My older dog is a "half-breed" Lab - all AKC but half show and half field. Her mother is a very high bred field dog (and she takes after her mom), but her father, though a very affable friendly sort, couldn't find a duck in a phone booth if you poured gravy on it.
Probably, given all the intervening generations between these Afghans and the desert sands, if you took one of them out and showed them a running gazelle, they would probably just stand there and pant and grin. Just a guess, given what I've seen in Labs in far fewer generations.
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