Imitation In Dogs Matches Humans and Apes 181
sciencehabit writes "The next time your dog digs a hole in the backyard after watching you garden, don't punish him. He's just imitating you. A new study reveals that our canine pals are capable of copying our behavior as long as 10 minutes after it's happened. The ability is considered mentally demanding and, until this discovery, something that only humans and apes were known to do."
Crows also learn and imitate (Score:2, Interesting)
I've seen a scientific documentary that shows how crows can learn just by looking at other fellows and imitate them to solve practical problems.
Human, apes and dogs are hardly the only species to do so.
fridge (Score:2, Interesting)
my old dog watched me open the fridge one day, and carried on doing it and emptying the contents until a child lock was put on it
Re: THAT explains it! (Score:5, Interesting)
Easy fix... put the shoes away. It's all about operant conditioning with dogs. I suggest an e-collar, an alternative him to chew on, and positive reinforcement when he does something you want. I hear imitation also works, you could fetch some of his toys to chew... ;-)
The other neat thing that dogs can do is figure out what you mean when you point at something, apes just can't seem to grasp this. NOVA did a documentary that attempted to qualify ape intelligence by showing the diffrences between human children and other animals. It was eye opening, particularly the use of tools and the crafting of weapons to kill prey by chimps. I think animals are a lot smarter then we give them credit for, anyhow here is a link: http://m.video.pbs.org/video/1200128615/ [pbs.org]
Dogs are no dummies (Score:2, Interesting)
Dogs have been scrutinizing us humans for 400 centuries, so they're experts at understanding our moods and behaviors.
Cats Can Do This, But Most Can't Be Bothered (Score:5, Interesting)
As for imitative behavior, he loves to watch me wash dishes. Turkish Vans are fascinated by water (in nature they swim for fun and fish for food), so he has to be on the counter watching whenever I'm washing dishes. He sees me apparently rubbing my "paws" together under the stream of water, and if I turn to put the dish in the drying rack, he will invariably start pawing at the stream of water, and then rubbing his paws together under the stream. He's invariably very confused because he doesn't understand what this accomplishes, but he keeps doing it because he sees me doing it.
Cats have the intelligence to imitate behavior, but they don't exhibit it because most domesticated cats do not have the pack mentality. They do their own thing unless there is a reward for doing your thing. You hear about people teaching their cats to flush the toilet, but that's usually because they're fascinated by the "reward" of getting to watch the whirlpool. Turkish Vans and dogs, however, will do things because they see you doing it and they want to win your approval by doing what you do.
Re: THAT explains it! (Score:5, Interesting)
More to the point, dogs and man have co-evolved. They are symbiotic species: they evolved in such a way that each species had a much better chance of raising progeny to mating age than either species had on its own. That's a strong natural selection process.
Part of this is that dogs and man learned to communicate with each other to a greater degree than dogs in a pack communicate with each other. They seek eye contact and use a rich gesture language to communicate their feelings to each other. Human pointing is an extension of that. The evolutionary advantages of pointing are pretty much obvious.
It should not be surprising that many of man's social structures-- lodges, tio-spayes, clans, small villages, high school cliques, gangs, etc-- are more dog-like than they are ape-like. Humans would not be like they are if they had not teamed up with dogs.
Re:Chihuahuas can imitate (Score:2, Interesting)
I had a border collie when I was a kid that would figure out just about anything. Opening doors, the refrigerator, digging up holes (and filling them in after getting an earful from my dad)... The most impressive thing she ever did though was picking vegetables from the garden. She could smell when they were ripe, and one year all the cantaloupe seeds that were planted sprouted. We had well over 400 cantaloupe that year, and it was very time consuming to pick them all. We would wake up in the morning with tens of fruit left at the back door, with teeth marks gently pressed in the rind from my dog.
She also tried to pick other vegetables, with varying levels of success. The funniest was tomatoes, as she just couldn't manage to be gentle enough and always ended up leaving them semi-squished on the back step.
Re: THAT explains it! (Score:2, Interesting)
I know there's some debate on this subject, however, my beagle will track across the screen and howl at any dog-like (or horse-like) image. I was curious if it was an audio cue, but she does it with the sound off, too. She doesn't react to a CRT, but pretty much any LCD or plasma (and not the fast refresh ones. The plasma in question is maybe a first or second gen plasma) I've run into has been good enough for her. Trying to watch Up was a funny experience. She freaked out the second the dog first appeared.
One of our bulldogs will growl at dog images for a bit, then seems to realize that it's not real and ignores it until the next one shows up. The other bulldog ignores everything (even most real dogs, so I can't really be sure that he sees them on tv)
Maybe there's significant difference throughout the dog population in this regard.