While there is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that dogs remember people (like their owner) and events (like going to the park), it’s still an open question whether or not they can travel back in time in their minds. That’s because man’s best friend has sadly been neglected when it comes to lab experiments. For a long time, scientists thought that because dogs are domesticated, they couldn’t prove anything about how natural species behaved. It is really only within the last 15 years that extensive examination of the doggie mind has begun.
In the video above, you can see an experiment where researchers fooled a dog by spreading his owners scent around the house, leaving the canine puzzled when the owner came home at his usual hour. While it doesn’t prove that dogs can smell time, it’s an intriguing idea.
Another explanation could come from the fact that some animals can read environmental cues. Perhaps dogs use the length of shadows to know the time of day.
Though there isn’t a good answer yet as to whether or not your dog knows what time it is, there could be one within the next few years. Dogs are receiving more and more attention from scientists, and it’s almost certainly only a matter of time before they are tested for www memories. Cognitive scientists in particular are interested to find the roots of our own episodic memory abilities.
Let’s say you give a chimpanzee two sealed opaque jars, each containing a treat. One jar has a non-perishing snack, something like a grape. But the other contains a treat that needs to be enjoyed within a certain time limit, like a frozen cube of juice that’s going to melt. After five minutes, the chimp is given the chance to open one jar. After an hour, it can open the other.
One of the best things about living with dogs is the unbridled joy with which they greet you when you come home â no matter how long youâve been away. It has long been thought, and oftentimes documented, that dogs have a sixth sense that allows them to âknowâ your ETA in advance. Just how do they do it?
She says, âIt might be that the odors that we leave around the house when we leave lessen in a consistent amount each day.â Basically, your smarty dogâs amazing nose knows that over the hours you are gone, your home begins to smell less of you.
In Alexandra Horowitzâs book, Being a Dog, she offers what seems to be a very reasonable explanation. It isnât just that they can smell us from afar or hear our footsteps or the car motor. Rather, as she writes, âthere was a potent combination of two forces leading to these dogsâ abilities. The first is the distinctness of our smell to our dogs. The second is the ease with which dogs learn our habits.âRelated article
Horowitz tested this theory by recruiting a colleague to sneak one of her partnerâs stinky t-shirts into the house hours after her partner left, once again infusing the house with his odor. And yes, the ruse seemed to work. That day, their dog, who had reliably demonstrated that he knew when his person was nearing home, was found snoring on the couch.
Dogs are also remarkably quick at associative learning. Theyâre very good at picking up on subtle cues like reading body language, changes in the environment, and listening to sounds. And not just your own signals, but maybe the sound of a neighborâs car that starts up a few minutes before you arrive home. Environmental stimuli like light shifts, sounds, smells, and even cues you canât pick up on can play a role in your dogâs ability to sense when youâre coming home.
We can conjecture that it’s just habit; of course a dog isn’t reading a clock or holding a stopwatch. But a recent study reveals that animals have neurons in their brain that are activated when the animal is waiting for an expected outcome. They aren’t so much telling time, as judging time.
Researchers at Northwestern University’s Department of Neurobiology found evidence that previously unknown neurons in an animal’s brain are activated when the animal is in waiting mode. The neurons are located in an area of the brain’s temporal lobe where we know that spatial memory is encoded. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, set out to prove that this area of the brain might also encode time memory.
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Kepp goes on to use the example of training for competitive obedience. If the trainer knows that the dog will have to perform a three-minute down, she will train the dog with an eight-minute down, five-minute down, etc. If you consistently train for the exact duration, the dog’s brain will fix on that amount of passing time and anticipate it.
Yes, a great deal of your dog’s behavior is governed by habit and repetition. Whether he’s the alarm clock that gets you out of bed at 6:15 a.m. or the sleepy pup who has decided the family bedtime is 9:30 p.m., it’s not his Apple watch that’s alerting him. And, while habit does seem to be the logical explanation, those habits may turn out to be the result of these surprising neurons that are “telling time” for animals.