Dogs Are Smarter Than Humans Think! Duh!

From the Telegraph.co.uk 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. "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 interpret what they see.