44 Hilarious Dog Posts To Put A Smile On Your Face

OK, what if your pup's cute head tilt that you've never seen before, happened while your phone was out of reach? Now you want a picture. But how do you get your pet to repeat an action it hasn't been trained to perform?

For K9s taught to "think back" on cue, you just have to ask. Turns out, dogs are capable of learning the instruction "do that again," and can flexibly access memories of their own recent actions — cognitive abilities they were not known to possess, according to the results of a recent University at Buffalo study.

"We found that dogs could be trained to repeat specific actions on cue, and then take what they'd learned and apply it to actions they had never been asked to repeat," the study's corresponding author, Allison Scagel, Ph.D., who was a UB graduate student in the Department of Psychology at the time of the research, said.

"Our findings showed that they were able to apply the concept of repetition to new situations. More generally, we found evidence that dogs are capable of forming abstract concepts."

Historically, there has been a notion that conscious awareness of past personal experiences is the exclusive domain of humans, but according to Scagel, recent research does not support that conclusion.

"Our study shows that dogs are capable of conceptualization, placing them in an expanding category of other animals that includes bottlenose dolphins and chimpanzees."

Scagel explained that the findings present new flexible training possibilities for dogs.

"Dogs can do more than learn the relationship between a person’s cue and which specific trick they should. They can understand the concept of repetition: Whatever you just did, do that again."

"It can apply to anything they do," she added.

We often test animals on their ability to recall things in the external environment they have recently observed, such as objects, sounds, or scents. Memories of actions are different because they’re not outwardly perceivable.

Memories are entirely internal; they are purely mental representations of previous personal experiences that can be recalled in ways that might influence what the creature chooses to do in the future.

For this study, the researchers looked at dogs' memories of their own recently performed actions to determine if they could voluntarily think back to what they had just been up to and reproduce those actions.

Three dogs participated: Todd, a male long-haired chihuahua belonging to Scagel; and two female golden retrievers — Aspen, belonging to an acquaintance of Scagel’s, and Layla, belonging to Scagel's co-author, Eduardo Mercado III, a UB professor of psychology.

Traditional dog training is cue and response — when dogs hear or see a trained cue, they respond with behavior they have associated with that cue. For a baseline, the researchers started training the dogs in that fashion, with simple cues like spinning in a circle, lying down, or walking around an object.

The dogs then learned a separate repeat cue (the word "again" accompanied by a hand gesture), which instructed them to reproduce the action they had just finished. To assess whether the dogs had actually learned a general concept of repeating recent actions, they were asked to repeat novel actions that they had never been asked to repeat before. And they passed the test.

"This is an important step toward a greater understanding of how other species form abstract concepts," Scagel said. "And we're learning that humans aren't that cognitively unique after all."

So if you teach your pooch how to do this, the possibilities to fill up your phone's camera roll are endless; you'll never miss their quirky moments again. For Bored Panda's earlier renditions of the series, check out more hilarious dog posts here and here.

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