Canine intelligence

Dog intelligence or dog cognition is the process in dogs of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and using in new situations information and conceptual skills.

Studies have shown that dogs display many behaviors associated with intelligence. They have advanced memory skills. For example, a border collie, "Chaser", learned the names of over 1,000 objects and retrieved them by verbal command. Dogs can use such memory skill to make inferences, and a border collie named Rico learned the labels of over 200 items and then inferred the names of novel items by exclusion. That is, he identified and retrieved those novel items immediately and also 4 weeks after the initial exposure. Dogs are able to read and react appropriately to human body language such as gesturing and pointing, and to understand human voice commands. Dogs demonstrate a theory of mind by engaging in deception.

Dogs have often been used in studies of cognition, including research on perception, awareness, memory, and learning, notably research on classical and operant conditioning. In the course of this research, behavioral scientists have uncovered a surprising set of social-cognitive abilities in the domestic dog, abilities that are not possessed by dogs' closest canine relatives nor by other highly intelligent mammals such as great apes. Rather, these skills parallel some of the social-cognitive skills of human children. This may be an example of Convergent evolution, which happens when distantly related species independently evolve similar solutions to the same problems. For example, fish, penguins and dolphins have each separately evolved flippers as solution to the problem of moving through the water. With dogs and humans, we may see psychological convergence; that is, dogs have evolved to be cognitively more similar to humans than we are to our closest genetic relatives.

However, it is questionable whether the cognitive evolution of humans and animals may be called "independent," as the cognitive capacities of dogs have inevitably been shaped by millennia of contact with humans. As a result of this physical and social evolution, many dogs readily respond to social cues common to humans, quickly learn the meaning of words, show cognitive bias and exhibit emotions that seem to reflect those of humans.

Research suggests that domestic dogs may have lost some of their original cognitive abilities once they joined humans. For example, one study showed compelling evidence that dingos (Canis dingo) can outperform domestic dogs in non-social problem-solving experiments. Another study indicated that after being trained to solve a simple manipulation task, dogs that are faced with an insoluble version of the same problem look at a nearby human, while socialized wolves do not. Thus, modern domestic dogs seem to use humans to solve some of their problems for them.

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