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Home Environment Animals

The most adorable study of the year shows how dogs recognize each other

All study participants were good girls and boys.

Tibi Puiu by Tibi Puiu
December 22, 2020
in Animals, News, Science
Reading Time: 3 mins read
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Imagine if some adult humans were the size of mythical giants and others were the size of two-year-olds. That’s the weird kind of world that dogs live in, exhibiting great variation in shape and size from one breed to the next. Considering dogs can look so different from each other, French researchers investigated how dogs determine whether another animal belongs to their own species. Although the study didn’t involve butt-sniffing, the researchers did find that, like humans, dogs can also recognize other dogs using their eyes.

The study was published in 2013, but it was only recently that it came to public attention after Benjamin Katz, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology, enthusiastically tweeted about it.

Every intro to cognitive psychology course has at least one chapter where we ask how people know that dogs are dogs – after all, they look so different from each other.

This research one-ups our question and asks: HOW DO DOGS KNOW THAT OTHER DOGS ARE DOGS?? pic.twitter.com/EhW99zbv5r

— Benjamin Katz (@DrBenKatz) December 10, 2020

Katz’s lengthy tweets not only emphatically described the study’s objective and study methods, but also its adorable subjects. These include Bag, Bounty, Sweet, and Vodka — an all-star lineup.

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The nine dogs were shown two images at a time: one featured a headshot of a dog, the other of a “non-dog” (a hamster, a cat, or a human). When one of the subjects chose the image of the dog, they got a tasty treat. In the second phase, the objective was reversed, and the dogs were rewarded when they picked the non-dog image. The criterion for a subject to pass from a given task to the following one was set at 10 correct trials out of 12, for two consecutive sessions.

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“Each of the nine subjects was able to group all the images of dogs within the same category. Thus, the dogs have the capacity of species discrimination despite their great phenotypic variability, based only on visual images of heads,” the researchers from the Université Paris wrote in their study.

Most dogs understood their task’s objective after a relatively small number of training sessions, except for Bounty, the two-year-old border collie.

Others took note of what may very well be Twitter’s cutest science thread of the year.

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Tibi Puiu

Tibi Puiu

Tibi is a science journalist and co-founder of ZME Science. He writes mainly about emerging tech, physics, climate, and space. In his spare time, Tibi likes to make weird music on his computer and groom felines.

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