‘Who’s a clever boy!’ Why your dog is even smarter than you think

Scientists in Hungary discover that canines have the mental capacity to tackle complex memory tests

Dogs really do understand what their owner is talking about, a study has found.
Scientists have shown for the first time that dogs remember objects, and have memories of them which are triggered by hearing the object’s name.
The presence of this so-called “mental representation” has never been shown in any other species except humans.
Scientists at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, recruited 18 owners and dogs for a study, and the dogs needed to know at least a handful of objects by name, such as stick, rope or ball.
Electrodes were stuck to the heads of the canines that would measure brainwave activity. The dogs laid down on a bean bag and looked at their owner who would say the name of an object, such as “ball”, and then either show the dog the ball, or show them something else, like a rope toy.
The brainwave data revealed that when the dog was shown the right item which matched the name, there was a specific activity pattern. However, when the dog was lied to, there was a completely different set of brainwaves.
This study, which has previously been used to test how infant humans learn language, proves dogs not only know names of objects, but have a memory of them they can recall instantly.
There is debate among scientists as to whether the dogs are able to actually “see” a known object in their mind’s eye, or if it is a more obscure and hard-to-define concept.
“The nature of the ‘mental representation’ has a history of long-debate in psychology, and some researchers argue that we can think of mental representations as ‘mental images’,” Dr Lilla Magyari, the study’s author, told The Telegraph.
“But others argue that mental representations are rather abstract and not related to any modality.
“We do not want to take part in this debate as it was not the research question of our study, but when the words were heard by the dogs in our study, it activated a “memory” [the so-called mental representation] of the object, hence, dogs were expecting to see the object corresponding to this mental representation.
“But when they saw an object which did not match their expectation, there was a deviation in their measured brain activity.”
Data from the experiment, published in the journal Current Biology, revealed that it took as little as a quarter of a second for the dog to realise the deception, which is comparable to speed of the human brain.
Dogs were quicker, and more certain, for items they were more familiar with, the study found.
“Your dog understands more than he or she shows signs of,” Dr Magyari added.
“Dogs are not merely learning a specific behaviour to certain words: they might actually understand the meaning of some individual words, as humans do.”
The study has shattered a long-held belief that humans were the only species able to think about, and communicate about, an object that was not present.
The scientists now hope to investigate how widespread this ability is in the animal kingdom, and if it is seen in more mammals in a bid to uncover more about the origins of complex cognition.