Psychology Today:Dogs Don't Remember
 

This must be devastating to some.


Dogs are wonderful creatures. Our dogs recognize me and are always happy to see me. Dogs are also smart and successful creatures. Our dogs have learned several cute tricks. But dogs (and other non-human animals) are missing something we take for granted: episodic memory. Dogs don't remember what happened yesterday and don't plan for tomorrow.

In defining episodic memory, Endel Tulving argued that it is unique to humans. Experience influences all animals. Most mammals and birds can build complex sets of knowledge or semantic memory. You and I also remember the experience of learning these complex sets of information. Dogs don't.

Episodic remembering is mental time travel and depends on a few crucial cognitive capabilities. First, in order to experience episodic remembering, an individual must have a sense of self. Most non-human animals have a dramatically different experience of self than we do. For example, most animals (and young humans) fail to identify themselves in mirrors. If I look in a mirror and see that I have something stuck between my teeth, I try to correct the problem. (I also wonder why my friends didn't tell me I had something stuck between my teeth.) In contrast, put a red dot on a child's forehead, put the child in front of a mirror, and watch what happens. Young children are more likely to reach for the baby in the mirror than for their own foreheads. Dogs treat the dog in the mirror as another dog; not as themselves. Most animals fail at the red dot mirror task.


https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...-dont-remember

I had a feeling that my dog doesn't sit around all day thinking about me.

And that's why dogs bury food and bones in the ground, so they can forget them right?

:1orglaugh

Why Does My Dog Hide His Bones? | PEDIGREE®

You don't need a memory when your sense of smell is thousands of times more precise than a human's.

Think about this, maybe it has nothing do with memory. The dogs sense of smell is 100 times better than humans he buries the bone and then locates it by sense of smell.

It's actually more like 10,000 to 100,000 -- which is almost unfathomable. When I cook bacon, I don't even know how my dog holds his shit together.

Dogs have shit vision, and their world is experienced through the nostrils.

So the dog knows where the bone is, or at the least, that there is a bone buried, but doesn't remember doing the burying - sounds pretty much in tune with what the article is getting at.

and I thought my cock was impressive to look at, you're telling me it just stinks of something that makes my dog wag it's tail?

So is the dog thinking ahead that he will be able to smell and find the food tomorrow?
Or is he just burying it because like WTF?

:1orglaugh

He doesn't think about it, because like INSTINCT.

What about squirrels, do they remember what tree hole they put the nuts in or do they
sniff it out like a dog?

:1orglaugh

Yep, instinct is how we explain everything that appears to be intelligent in the lower beings.

The dog has a brain but somehow the dog ain't thinking; the brain just keeps the tail wagging.

:1orglaugh

My dog has a better memory that I do!

This is all theoretical bullshit.

My dog goes fucking ballistic if she sees another dog on the tv, through the window, driving past one in a car, yet seeing herself on the tv in home videos or walking past the many mirrors in this house doesn't do a thing.

I don't think it's about brain function. As I type this right now, I'm not thinking "index finger hit the g key".

I'm saying a dog can't plan things in advance or contemplate life like humans do. They don't have language. A dog can show fear, but it doesn't even know what death or injury is.

We're scared of death because we understand abstract concepts. If you leave your dog alone for 3 hours, it may as well be 3 minutes or vice versa because he doesn't understand what time is. I just realized how ridiculous this conversation is, but it's kind of interesting because dogs are so close to us.

I think so. The article says non-humans have semantic memory. Here's an example from wikipedia "For instance, semantic memory might contain information about what a cat is, whereas episodic memory might contain a specific memory of petting a particular cat.".

He knows where a bone might be but he doesn't know how it got there. But why did he bury it in the first place? Animals must have some sense of the future. For example squirrels and bears prepare for winter by fattening up and hoarding food.

Maybe the dogs they tested have a concept of self but no concept of mirrors.

" Dogs don't plan for particular future events"

Yep, that's why my grand daddy told me to crawl under the house and
give the dog some water, because she just happen to wonder under the house where
she never goes and then bam! some puppies popped out.

And stupid squirrels building nest without any expectation of tree sex.

:1orglaugh

I think you're humanizing your dog.

Ever occur to you that there may be other reasons for that behavior?

Exactly. When my Labrador gives me a kiss, I realize its wolf behavior of the beta showing he's subservient to the alpha -- but I pretend its affection.

Sorry but this guy's dogs are fucking stupid and the fact that he has two stupid dogs
does not prove that no dogs are thinking.

:1orglaugh

You are getting into more areas than the article is about.

Consider this, how does reward/punishment training work with a dog if the dog does not remember the action it took in the episode to get the reward instead of the punishment?

Bam!

:pimp

Psychologists are specialists in making shit up and presenting it as science - psychology as a science is debatable, it's certainly not a science as biology and physics are.

Since dogs can't speak or write their interior lives are a mystery and will remain a mystery. Over and over the psychologists refer to animals not having self awareness because they don't recognize themselves in the mirror. That's no proof of anything other than a dog can't recognize itself in a mirror, there could be other reasons for that phenomenom other than 'dogs have no self awareness whatsoever'.

While dogs can't speak, anybody who's owned a dog knows that they will try to imitate human speech, hundreds of videos on Youtube of it. They physiologically can't speak like they physiologically can't hammer a nail into a board. They recognize words - I've had dogs who absolutely knew the word 'VET' as in veterinarian and if they heard it would cower or make themselves scarce.

The human concept of a MIND is probably more an illusion than the illusions psychologists keep pointing out we have about dogs and their behavior and intellect.

The whole thing about the mirror could mean something totally different.

For example : Humans are more concerned with how things look and visually scrutinize
things more than anything else in the world.
The human is bound to scrutinize the image in the mirror so closely that he/she will notice
that it moves precisely as he/she does where as a dog will not.

Hold on a second, this is not a debate about "Global Warming".

And this overbearing insistence to view dogs' behavior only as a descendant of a wolf, that all his modern day behavior is explained by his origins as a wolf living in a pack is ridiculous. Dogs have been domesticated and living with humans for TENS OF THOUSANDS of years, the relationship between dog and human is NOT the same as between wolves, a dog doesn't see a human merely as an alpha and himself as a lowly beta. Thousands of years of living in a much different and unique relationship has no doubt changed the dog. There's this whole new incredible field of epigenetics going on, the memories/experiences of our ancestors appear to be passed on to future generations - we're different than our earliest ancestors 200,000 years ago and so are dogs from their wolf ancestors.

It would be remarkable if a species of animal spent thousands of years living with another species, sharing the same home, as a companion/employee, and didn't develop some of the traits and behaviors of the co-habitating species.

The dog should thank god that he can't speak, if dogs could talk we'd lose our fondness for them real quick. Who would want a dumb hairy smelly loudmouth droning on about nothing, bitching and complaining all day and night long?

That's why I got divorced the first time. Why would your dog be complaining? He doesn't have to work for food or shelter.

Good post, the above is great. I will never again look at a dog and think I wish you could talk. :1orglaugh:1orglaugh


Could you imagine an old episode of "Lassie" ...

Instead of barking, ... HEY! Would someone open the fucking door! I need some water, I just ran all the way here in the damn heat to tell you your retarded son Timmy is trapped in the cave again! Jesus Christ that inbred kid is stupid. You are lucky as shit I've got nothing better to do since you cut my fucking balls off than to follow his smelly ass around all day.

Give me a treat and maybe I'll lead you to him before he dies of panic the little pussy. Wasn't someone here supposed to block the entrance after the last time? If anyone around here needed neutered it was him, you really want grandkids some day?


.

LOL there's a thousand things dogs could complain about, including his food and accommodation. It seems with humans that the more people have the more things they complain about - so dogs would probably be the same.

:1orglaugh

My dog was bit at the dog park by another dog.

To this day if that dog is at the park then my dog is frightened by it still. If the biter is not there then mine is good to go and has a blast. Even if it is the smell of the other dog that causes her the stress that is still based on episodic memory of an event, specific to that dog, not to the place, or the other animals present.

Also, whenever we drive within several miles of the dog boarding place that is five acres of doggie Disneyland then they get excited. Yes, they can smell that they are getting close, but they certainly appear to have a memory of that smell.

Self awareness in mirrors may have no relative value because dogs don't have the same perception of ego/self but that doesn't at all mean that they don't have episodic memory.

Balderdash. Another scientist that can't see the forest for the trees because of their educational disciplines.

Nonsense.

This strikes me as an attempt to try to come up with a very specific definition of cognition that ultimately leads to the conclusion that human mental processes are leaps and bounds beyond those of other animals. It's an argument made to support a pre-determined conclusion.

I tried to read this entire thread but I could feel my brain getting ready to implode over some of the commentary.


I take it you have never seen a nature program or you think dogs are different than every other creature on the planet.


Actually, depending on the breed(?) of squirrel, losing a few of the nuts is what causes new trees.

My dog reacts to bears on TV; and wolf howls

Okay then

Fuck Psychology Today I want to know what the Dog Whisperer has to say about this.

Dig him up and ask his zombie corpse.

i like dog poo

bs.. a dog 'waiting at a masters grave' would be an episodic memory, and thats not getting into the ability to remember where food sources is, relations of 'bangs' to being afraid of fireworks, relations of 'being afraid of a raised hand' etc

to even say episodic memory is unique to humans is simplistic at best, as other great apes wouldn't 'be human' and they have the same abilities

Bottom line : You're retarded.

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I dont know but my pit mix would come in my office and stare at me at 5pm every day because it was dinner time.It was weird like she could tell time. I think they live in the moment but I think they remember.

why are you ALWAYS wrong?

Sighthound - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mine would do the exact same thing every night at 7. I couldn't figure out if she knew the time or heard the beginning of Two And A Half Men and reacted to the theme song. Either way her memory said time to eat..

Thats a small group. Most dogs smell is their primary sense and its amazing.

NOVA | Dogs' Dazzling Sense of Smell

"OLYMPIC SNIFFERS
Dogs' sense of smell overpowers our own by orders of magnitude?it's 10,000 to 100,000 times as acute, scientists say. "Let's suppose they're just 10,000 times better," says James Walker, former director of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, who, with several colleagues, came up with that jaw-dropping estimate during a rigorously designed, oft-cited study. "If you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well."


Put another way, dogs can detect some odors in parts per trillion. What does that mean in terms we might understand? Well, in her book Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz, a dog-cognition researcher at Barnard College, writes that while we might notice if our coffee has had a teaspoon of sugar added to it, a dog could detect a teaspoon of sugar in a million gallons of water, or two Olympic-sized pools worth. Another dog scientist likened their ability to catching a whiff of one rotten apple in two million barrels."

interesting stuff

psycho babble baloney as applied to canines.

Any instinct needs abilities to be implemented. A dog needs paws to dig and jaws to hold a bone, he needs a memory to remember where to search for it tomorrow etc.

I think scientists have too much free-time :)

I can't remember what this thread is about...

:1orglaugh

very interesting.
I just tried the red dot experiment with my husband. He tried to touch it in the mirror. Oh well! I always knew something was amiss with him :P

Once they thought the earth was flat.... Nuff said