the Queen of mystery Agatha Christie have a novel called “Mute witness,” in which a crime occurs in front of the dog – it helps Hercule Poirot to uncover a case. About the phenomenal memory of dogs has been written many scientific papers, however, the intelligence of four-legged Pets still never ceases to amaze scientists.
a New study of Hungarian ethologists (specialists in animal behavior) have shown that if dogs could talk, they could tell a lot about the life of their owners. In particular, they remember those moments, which people would long to forget.
“the Results of our study can be seen as another step in the destruction of artificial barriers between humans and animals,” — says the head of Fugazza Claudia (Claudia Fugazza) of the Budapest University named after eötvös.
start To explain that the memory has several varieties, one of them is called episodic (or event). She is responsible for keeping information obtained empirically, in the context of any action. The facts in this case are stored on the “hard drive of our brains” themselves, regardless of whether, a man wants it or not.
Storage of such information engages the hippocampus and surrounding area (medial part of the temporal lobe of the cortex of hemispheres of the brain). The type of information in this region of the brain, and the cells and structures for his work, incredibly similar in humans, primates and rodents. However, to establish the existence of episodic memory in other animals has until recently been quite difficult. Recent studies have shown that many birds, and even insects have this kind of memory. Now this group was joined by a dog.
For their experiments, the researchers from Budapest used the four legged friends who have been trained by the command “do as I do” repeat for the owner of a particular action (e.g., jump). The man utters the phrase, a dog watching his behavior and reproduces the movement.
Ethologists tested two hypotheses: first, that the dog can repeat the actions a man accidentally (though less successfully than when they were expecting to be asked about this), and secondly that they will forget about random actions than those who have memorized intentionally.
the experiment involved 17 dogs. They passed the command “do as I do” to a new animal movements (for example, to climb on a chair or to touch it with his paw). Then, to throw the dogs off, when they expect the team to “do as I do”, they were given the command “down”. The dog received a reward, when I went — that is, from the point of view of the animal, to remember previous actions at this time seems to be not required.
Next the dogs were shown two new acts for which they did not previously natrenirovannosti (for example, touching a paw to the umbrella). The man did not mean that the actions you need to remember that the animal did not have the motivation to do it intentionally. Then followed an interval length of one hour or one minute, during which the dog was behind a screen and could not see the object with which she will need to interact, nor to repeat what has shown to her master. And after followed the command “do as I do”.
the scientists ‘ Hypothesis was confirmed: after the screening of the actions that the dog does not remember deliberately, almost in 95% of cases they were able to reproduce at least one of them. However, the probability to recall a random effect significantly decreased with time (judging by the delayed reaction and a long look at the owner, they were surprised by the unexpected command).
At the same time, intentionally held in the memory information, which, according to the expectations of the Pets were to be used again, did not undergo significant changes over time and the same was successfully demonstrated and a minute later, and an hour later.
“From the point of view of evolution this means that the mechanism of memory, similar to episodic memory, not a unique and developed only in primates, but is present in other members of the animal Kingdom. Dogs thus can help us to reveal the secrets of episodic memory, especially considering the fact that they have been living among the people and well understand us,” he said Fugazza.
the Authors note that the findings of the study also prove that dogs have a special form of consciousness — the ability to separate themselves from the outside world — and realize the intentions and actions of others.
the Full study is published in the scientific journal Current Biology.
earlier, scientists have established that the Antarctic birds are able to remember the man’s face, though you meet him in their environment and often, but the stingrays were the first species that can recognize themselves in the mirror.
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