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.
Well, that explains Pelosi, Boxer and Hillary.
Amen brother....a good Dobie is smart, alert and fearless and very family oriented.
That one I posted died a few years ago....we plan to replace him with one of his nephews in about 10 months when we move to a place south of Nashville with land.
Dogs are great. We love them so much. Next April 30 will be our 30th Wedding Anniversary and to date we’ve had the pleasure of 30 dogs in our lives. Sometimes as many as six at once. The dogs were always either runaways we couldn’t find their homes, or abandoned. Currently we have two LabIdiots and an AkitaShepard.
We are down to sixteen cats here at the Rockin’ QS Ranch as well with several visitors from nearby ranches occasionally blessing us with their presence. Yes all are spayed or neutered including the visitors.
Wearing them out...
Mine camp on the back porch so they can launch off to run the fuzzy rats.
I think you nailed it!
You’ve changed a lot since then.
Just kidding, of course. Good friend of mine named Ken always has a Doberman and they always amaze me with their cleverness. It bugs Ken that the dogs greet me like a buddy when he trains them for guarding. I think intelligent dogs who aren’t abused to insanity recognize (and respond to) respect from a human just as they recognize fear.
Be very, very careful when using the word "BATH"!
Great looking dog.
Agree. I have two of them. More personality and loyalty than in any other breed I’ve come in contact with. Love the Yorkies.
I thought the dog had to much to drink and was worshiping the porclien god!
This is such a common phenomenon that we train against it in retriever training.
You teach a dog not to go to "the area of the old fall" by teaching him to run through it on his way to a mark. A more advanced lesson is to handle him to a blind past or through an area in which he found a bird earlier.
It's something you have to work through before going on to advanced handling.
Our best dogs in the club can do "quads" - four birds thrown one after the other, then picked up in reverse order (or as indicated by the handler - that's tricky stuff). My dog is an advanced beginner, but she can do a triple -- throw and shoot three birds, and she will remember where all of them are and pick them up in reverse order.
Some of this talent can be taught, but marking (identifying the place where the bird fell) and memory are innate. Of course, retrievers have been bred for this talent for hundreds of years, so a well-bred Labrador tends to mark like a laser and have a really good memory.
Border collies with all of the herding background have to similarly identify what they're herding (sheep, runner ducks, whatever). They probably have to count pretty high to notice that one is missing, too!
A friend of mine breeds and shows them. I have NEVER seen a breed that is so consistently dumb as a box of rocks (American Cocker Spaniels can be as dumb as an Afghan, but they vary more in intelligence. I do know some smart ones). Afghans are gorgeous, but like beauty queens they've been bred for that to the exclusion of everything else.
My Labs are the opposite - they're bred to pick up ducks, and as far as the field Labs are concerned nobody cares what they look like, so long as they shed water and can run like blazes.
Let me introduce you two Beagle owners to each other. You can commiserate about your (nearly) bursting Beagles.
(Hair actually has pictures. I think she always has a camera handy.)
Intersting, although I don’t quite know exactly how this was conducted.
I still don’t see how anyone can actually claim that dogs can’t “think” - nor, for that matter, many other animal types. It’s pretty clear to me they do have certain levels of cognitive abilities.
Even Max von Stephanitz recognized this back in the ‘20s with his German Shepherds. And he in many ways was an unsentimental old-fashioned pragmatist.
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