Dogs can store the names of toys in their long-term memory and remember them two years from now, according to a new study published September 4 in the journal Biology Letters.
The authors of the study are a trio of ethologists from Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest, who investigated the long-term memory of dogs.
Previous research has found that dogs can associate human words with toys. If the dog is instructed to fetch the “whistle”, he can ignore the other toys and fetch the particular toy. Some breeds are more gifted at these tasks than others, and differences were also noticeable between individual dogs within the same breed. The best dogs were given the designation “dogs gifted at learning words”.
In a new study, researchers asked whether the association in dogs was formed by frequent use of the object or whether it is stored in long-term memory. To test the theory, they tested five dogs previously trained to associate human words with toys and retrieve them on command.
Each dog was trained to associate names with 12 toys that it had not known until then. After thoroughly consolidating the knowledge, the scientists put the toys away for two years and after two years tested the dogs individually – each test toy was shown to them and mixed in the next room with the toys the dogs were familiar with. The researchers then told the dogs to retrieve the toy by saying its name. Each dog was tested twice with each toy.
The researchers found that the dogs were successful 44 percent of the time overall, but some were as successful as 60 percent. Scientists point out that the percentage success rate significantly exceeds the statistical probability of a successful random selection. This clearly shows that dogs store the names of toys in their long-term memory for two years, the researchers say.
According to the scientists, the research brought a unique opportunity to investigate the ability to store the labels of things in memory in species incapable of speech.
Source: vat.pravda.sk
