This week's show is sponsored by Wellness Corps.
Can you close your eyes and picture your favourite toy from when you were a child?
That ability to visualise a memory is a powerful tool we take for granted.
Some humans can't visualise mental images at all.
But what about dogs?
Can they picture their favourite toy from when they were a puppy?
How about other types of memory?
Episodic, like how you remember your day,
playing back taking your dog for a walk, like a video in your own head.
Semantics, the facts you know about things, like dogs and mammals.
And then there's non-declarative memory.
The stuff you don't need to think about, you just do it like riding a bike.
You're not saying dogs know how to ride a bike, are you?
Do they reminisce about their puppyhood?
Or do they live in the moment?
Welcome to the Dog Scholar.
Do dogs remember in pictures just like we can?
Well, I found a study that looked at exactly that.
There were 28 dogs in Japan that took part in the study.
Scientists played a sound recording of either their owner or a stranger's voice.
And it was followed by a single photo.
And it either matched the voice that they heard or didn't.
And they recorded the length of time the dogs looked at each face.
And they found the dogs looked longer at the faces
that mismatched with the voice they just heard.
Now, if dogs were remembering the person as a picture when they're hearing the voice,
you'd expect them to look longer at the mismatched image
because it wasn't what they were expected.
So this was actually the first demonstration
that non-human animals can remember in pictures.
So they looked longer at the faces that didn't match.
That makes sense, wouldn't it?
I mean, from an evolutionary standpoint,
you'd want to pay attention to the unknown a little bit more than the known, wouldn't you?
Yeah, that would be my thing as well.
You want to make the idea of living in this world,
you want to be able to predict and control outcomes and events, don't you?
So anything that disconfirms that that says,
well, hang on, mate, you shouldn't be speaking like that.
If your partner suddenly walked in speaking like Daffy Duck,
or something you'd think, well, what are you speaking like that for?
Whereas if they walked in speaking normally, then you'd pay attention to it.
And I should imagine that that is equally valuable to your dog.
I mean, people could try it, couldn't they?
Try speaking to your dog in some sort of weird voice and see what they do.
See if they look at you puzzled, as though there's something wrong with you.
I might do that when I get home and just see what the humans around me do.
I'll walk in and go, you're all right, lad, what are you doing, lad?
Yeah.
But what I liked about this is it showed that whatever they were recalling to go,
oh, that doesn't quite match, it was recalling it in a picture
because they were remembering the face.
I think it says something about how dogs experience the world.
Because I'm really guilty sometimes of just, obviously, with a behaviourism background,
it's like reductionist black and white response outcome.
And sometimes I know that I can kind of ignore some of this stuff,
but actually it showed me that there is more to it than I might be given credit for.
I'm a big advocate of what I coin as allowing your dog to see the world,
but perceive it as only in the background.
And going off that, if they're more likely to fixate on things that are unfamiliar,
obviously, whether they're working it out or from an evolutionary standpoint,
it's like to risk assess.
The amount of reactivity I deal with, like fear activity,
and it all stems from us allowing our dogs to fixate and go down that rabbit hole of,
oh, and then before you know it, they have to make a choice to better that situation.
And I literally always start these behaviour change programmes with
the dog needs to see it, but only perceive it as in the background.
If your dog has a fear of traffic and you start at a distance away,
walking your dog, but keeping them focused on something,
traffic passes by and they just accept it a bit better.
It becomes the information that they might be suspicious of or scared of.
It becomes much more easier to digest.
So that would fall in line with what they found, wouldn't it?
And if they can remember in a picture, that's kind of like the foundation
for how you would make a category of something, how you'd recognise something else.
If that were my study, I'd think I'm going to push this one step further.
I'm going to show you a picture of your favourite beach
where you go for a walk or your favourite park.
And instead, I'm going to play road traffic noise,
or I'm going to play a children's playground over the top of it
and see if I get the same level of confusion and mismatch there.
Oh, smells!
I wonder if dogs can remember and smells.
It is their primary scent, after all.
There's all sorts of things that you could throw in there, isn't there,
to be able to see how does this affect it?
Or even put it from the behavioural example I gave,
maybe match a smell that they really like with that picture
that they might be a bit suspicious of.
Would that snap them out of it?
Or you could do a smell of a particular person, their owner,
with an unfamiliar face and see if that would...
There is something there about activating that seeking system, isn't there,
that puts them in that zone of,
I'm not really paying attention to this now, my nose is taking over.
I like that.
Temple Grandham wrote a brilliant book, which I believe was Thinking in Pictures.
I think that was the title of it.
If not, if you Google Temple...
I can't picture it!
I want it that you can't...
I can't picture it!
I just think it's ironic that you can't remember.
I've got it, I can see it.
I can recall the picture to mine, you see?
It's a sort of browny sort of colouring on the back.
It's a good book, a good book for people to have a read of
that goes through that sort of picture thinking as opposed to,
and links in directly to her own, I believe, autism.
You know, and how she perceives things,
which is how she was able to bring the two in together and match the two.
So sort of like, revolutionise the American beef industry.
Nice.
Well, of course, in humans, emotion can trigger you to have a much more vivid memory.
And it would be interesting to know if it's the same with dogs.
I would suspect yes from behaviour that I've observed,
but I haven't found a study...
I would aim from...
Obviously, it's anecdotal through experience,
but I would absolutely say that is relevant.
If there's an outcome linked to that picture,
i.e. something not nice happens or something betters their situation,
something nice happens,
the dog's more likely to remember it as a learning event.
Yeah. I mean, why would you have the ability to be able to find things
more pleasant or more unpleasant if there weren't a linked benefit to that?
You know, so yeah, I definitely think that the more emotionally arousing something is,
you know, in whatever capacity, the more impact it has on Emory.
I think in terms of like, teaching your dog things
and wanting to, you know, engage with your dog.
We've mentioned this before, but you know,
it all boils down to seeing the world with three things in mind.
Avoid discomfort, indulge in pleasure and better your own situation.
They're the kind of things that's going to shape your dog's behaviour
as you're, you know, wallowing through life.
Yeah. Good job they don't have to worry about things like morality as well.
Yeah. Or tax.
Yeah.
Oh, don't get me started.
There's some fantastic things coming out here,
like, so the people who are listening remember it, aren't you?
Yeah.
But listen, we know dogs can remember in pictures,
but can they remember in videos too?
Well, we looked at a study that looked at whether dogs could copy a behaviour after a delay.
So could they recall it in a sequence like a video clip?
Eight dogs were taught to copy what a person did using a method called do as I do.
But the dogs were made to sit and stay, and then they watched a person do something,
like walking around a cone or jumping on a table or pushing a hanging object.
And they used objects that the dogs knew, so they were familiar, and novel ones as well.
And they were kept in place while the trainer would run off and hide behind a curtain.
It was a good 14 metres away.
And then they told the dogs to do it without being seen.
So the dogs had to remember and repeat the action after different lengths of time,
sometimes up to 10 minutes.
And they found dogs were able to repeat both familiar
and brand new actions after a delay, even if they got distracted in between.
They could imitate actions even when a new person gave them the do it command.
So it looks like they can remember and recall in sequences of events, just like a movie clip.
The new behaviours is something to think about, but the familiar ones is no surprise
because repetition instills behaviour in dogs like it does in all of us, doesn't it?
Yeah, and with this with the picture side of things as well,
I recently put up a video on one of my online programmes where I deliberately took a known command,
which was a recall command.
And instead just shouted completely random words.
Never one was knickers and I think the other one was custard or something like that.
Amazing.
And on each time, yeah, it was a recall command and a stationary.
So the dog had to stop and lay down at distance.
Well, completely out and about, just running around with another dog enjoying themselves.
And that command came out and the dog performed the behaviour.
Yeah.
Immediately performed the behaviour.
They all listen to the tone, aren't they?
It's the context.
It's the picture.
I've done something exactly the same as that.
We are hell bent on, as dog owners and as dog trainers, as an industry, in basically
focusing on the command, focusing on the signal.
And we miss it.
We basically focus on the tree and we miss the woods.
We need to look at the entire picture and that is the information that the dog draws
in order to perform the response.
So arguably they might be remembering different things than we think they're remembering,
but they're remembering something nonetheless.
But I wondered when we were looking at this study whether there are things that we can
do to improve a dog's memory.
Oh yeah, well, improve our own, I would suppose we can improve dogs.
Have you heard of mind palaces?
Yeah, I've heard of mind palaces.
There's a world's best, what do you call it?
He remembers cards and he holds a world record for it.
And there was an interview, he talked about how he does it.
I think it was that technique.
I love mind palaces.
So I used to use these a lot, particularly for exams.
And so if you had to remember a shopping list, you would imagine going into your house,
you might put the first item on your shopping list, I don't know, in your kitchen or something,
if that's the first room that you go into.
But you don't just kind of like, I don't know, say it's an apple, leave an apple on the side,
because you forget about that.
Make something crazy and stupid about that apple so that it really tells a story and
it helps you to remember it.
So the apple might be a giant apple and someone's got pots and pans from your kitchen and it's
like smacking this apple with these pots and pans.
And you kind of go in, you remember that and then you're like, oh yeah, apple,
that's what I've got to remember.
I struggled to retain knowledge right the way through school, obviously,
for my age, ADHD, when I diagnosed things.
So I really struggled paying attention.
I won't go around the world, but when I come out of the army,
I learned sign language and was doing that for a living.
And what I realized is I kind of stumbled across an ability to retain knowledge because
if I signed it and translated it, it was a picture that was solid.
And I never had that before.
And so I suppose that's a similar sort of thing, because I'm actually
porting pictures to the words.
I remembered things much more effectively.
And that's true.
And the crazier and more stupid or random or weird or even rude you can make it,
the more likely it is to stick.
And it's tough for dogs, isn't it?
Because you can't go, okay, we're going to...
It's called rude.
You would, you would.
But you can't then kind of say to a dog, hey, this is a technique that you can use.
Let's do a doggy mind palace.
But how could you?
By doing exactly what you've just said, but by doing it, you're doing it
via mental imagery, but what you're doing, I'm suggesting, is attaching greater emotional
significance to the apple by putting it out of context in something that your brain is thinking.
I'm guessing your brain is thinking that's unusual.
Remember that.
That's important.
So with my dog, if I take something and I think I'm going to generalize this,
but make it a little bit different, a little bit beyond what you would expect.
So my recall command, for example, gets a far greater reward than you were expecting
compared to the single thing that you were getting.
So the dog thinks, whoa, hang on, there's emotional significance to this.
There's emotional significance attached to that.
Got more interaction with her when I came back or when I jumped into the car that I
normally don't get into because my emotional response is to keep away from.
But when I got into it, bang, something fantastic happened.
I think definitely you're sort of like applied mind palace, your mind kennel.
It's like your applied mind kennel.
I'm taking it and putting it there.
Yeah, 100%.
I love it.
The interesting thing there is if you sat that exam here, France or in Germany,
the technique will be relevant, but with dogs, a lot of the time, the behavior can dictate
their ability to be able to recall.
That's like how many people will tell you, he comes to me every time there, but if we
go there, he doesn't.
You know what I mean?
Changing the environment has a big impact on how your dog remembers things.
And a lot of dogs can perform absolutely impeccably in a training ground, but you go to a test
environment and it's a different environment and the dog literally could not perform.
That's a really good point because there's something about our memory of a particular
thing that we're trying to do with our dog or our memory of walking them through a field
is from our perspective.
So it's a bit like a movie.
So if you're going for a walk with your dog and you're remembering it, you're remembering
your movie clip, right?
But if the dog is remembering something that it's supposedly learned, it's remembering
it from their movie clip's perspective and their camera angle might be completely different.
And we talked before about examples when I was doing sendaways with Luther and I couldn't
figure out why suddenly he would stop sending.
And the guy that I was training with said, it's because of your knees, because every
time you send him, you bend your knee and now you're standing up straight.
He's not got the same cue.
So my memory of it is that I had taught him to go on a signal that I was giving him.
Yeah.
But his memory, he's attached it to the movement of the knee.
So it's a completely different memory for him.
I take that one further as well, Aime.
We always assume that our perspective is the same as the dog's.
Training at aim, a mark.
So for anyone who knows a mark, you stand there with your dog, you see something fall,
you say dog's name, the dog knows I can run in and get that.
As in when you're training a retriever.
Yeah, yeah, similar.
But I don't have to point and send and know that the dog's captured what's fell.
And I just say, I go flint and he runs in and gets it, that kind of thing.
And I was on it, it was a busy drive and I went flint and he went that way.
And I went, what the, called him back, what has gone on?
And the penny dropped that, what I see here is not what he's seen here.
He couldn't see past that.
That was more in his line of sight.
And that can be a really powerful thing for pet owners to understand
that will alleviate a lot of frustration that you can feel
if you think it's not going right.
Sometimes it's good to step outside the box, know this kind of stuff.
You don't have to be an expert in it,
but getting it on the right path of thinking,
which is going to make training your dog less stressful.
So if I drew a six in the table, I would say it's a six,
but you would swear blind to me that it was an eight,
that's how you see it.
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Do dogs remember the last thing they did?
Now, I like this study, this ended up being a nature paper.
It's really hard to publish in the journal Nature,
so only the best studies make it into there.
This particular one, they trained 10 dogs to repeat an action
they'd just done in their daily life following a specific command.
And those actions could vary.
It might be having a drink of water from their bowl,
it might be lying down somewhere or interacting with an object.
The test was done outside the lab in a normal environment,
so the dogs weren't expecting a test.
It was quite natural.
And they found that dogs were able to repeat their own actions,
whether it was a learned behavior like down
or something more spontaneous like taking a drink of water.
They were able to do this after a delay of 20 seconds, of one minute
and some of them even after an hour,
which is an amazing thing to do. So the dogs definitely
grasped the concept of repeat my last action,
but they also very likely were relying on memory rather than an association.
So repeat my last action as in repeat the dog's last action?
Yeah.
Okay.
That's always problematic because the dog will normally go to where
the last find was, wouldn't it?
If you're teaching search dogs, you find, say you're using cones
and you find it in that cone.
Or gundogs, you send them over there and that's where they got that.
It's a concerted effort to teach them like, I know you've been there,
but we're going there now.
And you have to, how many times when you're teaching your dogs to send away,
Jay, if you're putting different things out,
they want to go to the last place they found things.
So we have to make an effort to teach them, trust me.
Yeah. And that's a really good example of that type of memory in practice,
isn't it? They're remembering where the last thing was that they went to
and they're going back there.
So for me again, that is evidence of dogs remembering things
in a very similar way to we do.
They remember sequences of events.
They're remembering like a movie clip of something that happened in their brains,
not just a very kind of static link between something.
But there's a feel good factor as well, isn't it?
Because whatever they remember and there's an emotion attached to it,
they're getting something from it.
I sort of think if I, like this morning, we came from the hotel to the studio,
right?
Via the wrong train.
Via the wrong train, right.
Emotionally significant, we remember that.
But I could, personally in my mind, I can visualize that whole journey.
Why should it be that I can and a dog can't?
Why is that even sort of something where we think, oh, no, you can't do that?
Why not? Why not?
I didn't get a reward on every step of the journey,
yet I can remember every step of the journey.
I think our company was your own reward.
That's what it was.
Probably.
We had a conversation.
Either that or it was intensively aversive.
As I couldn't escape.
I was trapped.
It was emotionally significant.
Maybe it's about ability.
We were touching this last night and I asked you, didn't I?
I was going down a bit of a rabbit hole and I said,
just because these areas in the brain light up,
that doesn't mean that they work like ours.
What if they work at a much lower level?
So it might just be that if, let's say, we're going on the same journey,
the same parts of the brain are lighting up,
ours is taking in much more information than theirs.
It might just be that.
Or vice versa.
Think about a mobile phone, a bit like an output.
So we're seeing the outputs of these things,
but a mobile phone that you might have had five years ago
might not perform as well as a mobile phone that you'd have today.
And it could be the same with dogs' memories.
Go on one further.
It differs between people.
So of course it's going to with dogs.
Sabrina will memorise far more information.
Than I have given your title and your achievements.
And even if it's a, let's say, a gift from God for having intelligence,
it's still a practised behaviour.
You're doing it more effectively.
I suppose going back to the example that I gave about the journey,
it could be argued that you know to remember a journey
because you're in an unfamiliar place
and it pays you an evolutionary advantage
to be able to retrace your steps back to a point of known safety,
either the hotel room if you needed to.
Good point.
But then the dog as an acute sense of smell.
So, you know, maybe that makes up for it.
Smell its way back to safety.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, could do.
I like this.
Use a snap.
A snap, yeah?
I like this.
Can you snap us to the listener questions, Jamie?
Question one is from Gabby from Jolly's Bottom in Cornwall.
OK, like basically, if you took your dog out on a walk
and you came across one of your dog siblings
that it hadn't seen for years, theoretically,
could it remember them?
And if it could, would they remember their smell
or their smell of their dog?
Would they remember their smell or their face?
Ooh.
Theoretically, I'd say, yeah.
But if you're talking years, I'd say no.
I think there's a familiarity thing with this.
I think technically with smell, if they still smelt the same,
very possibly.
Their face, personally, I'd say less likely
because the face would have changed so much.
Even if they do have a memory, a recollection back to that point,
it's very unlikely that the face would be the same.
So if you had a twin, for example,
that you hadn't seen since you were both one,
would you still recognise them in the street when they're 30?
If they were non-identical.
Well, yeah, I could point.
I'd be like, oh my god, that looks like me!
It's me, Dirk Luganger!
How the fuck?
I mean, it's impossible to answer, Gabby.
It's impossible to answer, isn't it?
Nothing is impossible.
It is impossible to say whether a dog can remember somebody
because you could...
I'll say what, there's a thing that I saw
where somebody walked a dog when it was a puppy,
then the dog goes ahead and is put into a working life,
and then a little bit later on,
the dog comes back to see the people who walked the dog
when it was a puppy,
and the dog's jumping up at the people.
And the dog is pleased to see the people
because the dog remembers the people.
The reductionist sponge sponge in me says,
bring in 20 other couples
and see when you bring the dog in in the same way,
does the dog go and jump up at the other people and see them?
If they're fussing the dog in the same way
that first people do.
So you can't really say for certain, can you?
But my instinct is to say, why wouldn't it?
Why couldn't it?
Do you know what I mean?
If it's sort of like, if you smell the same,
you look roughly the same, you probably are the same.
You know what I mean?
So yeah, go ahead.
The way that's weirded though,
it kind of says to me that you're just walking about
and you spot someone, you go, oh, there's Jamie.
And my answers to that would be, well,
if you look at Flint, my Labradors litter,
they all look the same.
You know what I mean?
So in that case, does Flint just see any black Labrador
and go, whoa, brother!
You know what I mean?
Oh, there's me brother!
But do they smell the same?
Yeah, but you're saying, the way it's weirded,
I kind of get this vision that you're walking around
and they've spotted each other.
But you can recognize someone's smell.
They would definitely be able to identify by smell.
I don't know how many years that would last for,
but dogs have a specific odor.
It's like a fingerprint, isn't it?
Yeah, when they smell each other,
that's why they piss on things.
Yeah, are they able to remember things
from when they were young as well?
Because we can't remember stuff
from when we were babies necessarily.
So does their memory change over time in the same way?
Oh my gosh, I've got so many questions.
I want to go and do an experiment.
I think every single study we look into,
there's scope to take it a lot further
and get more information.
I think there really is.
Question two is Gina in Hartfordshire.
My senior dog seems to be getting a bit dazed now he's older.
It's like he can't remember people anymore.
He reacted aggressively to my aunt the other day,
who he's known for years.
It was like she was a stranger.
Is it possible for dogs to lose their memory as they age?
Well, yeah, dogs can get senile.
What I would say is your first cause of action
is to take your dog to the vet
because there's conditions that can cause
random bursts of aggression.
Ear infections are a massive one.
I've had quite a few clients,
well, they haven't even been clients,
they've phoned me to book in.
And I've gone, has this only just happened?
Yeah, take your dog to the vet first.
Ask them to check their ears.
And they messaged me back and gone,
oh my God, they had an ear infection.
Never had it again.
On the other side of things,
dogs like us can get a bit senile as they get older.
And what I would say is,
obviously consult your vet still,
but just respect that and understand that,
okay, they're changing as they get older.
Maybe we have to put a bit of a different routine
when guests come round now to make sure everyone's safe
and your dog's not startled
and feeling like it needs to defend itself.
That's a really good one
because the vets can do a dementia assessment evaluation
for you on your dog.
And there are a couple of things that they'll look out for.
One can be disorientation.
So the dog might often seem lost
and that can be an indication that dementia has set in.
They'll look at whether their interactions
with people have changed.
So just the way that Gina explains here
with the dog reacting differently to somebody,
they'll look at whether their sleep
and their wake cycles are different as well.
They sleeping at different times a day,
are they awake at times they'd usually be asleep.
They might saw the house more as well.
And they might have differences in their anxiety as well.
They might be more anxious or less anxious
they can become a lot more sensitive to sound as well.
Yeah.
Danny, can you remember your final thought?
Well, funny enough, I had a great final thought
but it seems my memory has let me down.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
See you next week.