How does a dog's memory work?
That's pretty much my question: how does a dog's memory work? Obviously dogs can remember things (ie - form long-term memories), but in what sense is that true?
From what I've read (just on the internet, so not anything substantiated by much) dogs simply form associations between their own feelings on something (pleasant/painful/etc) and a stimulus. When they see that stimulus again, they "remember" that feeling and then act accordingly. They can't "pull up" memories in the sense that we can (like remembering a past vacation or meal).
So if I left a room angry at a dog, stayed away for an hour, then came back, would the dog "remember" my anger from before, or just pick up whatever cue I was giving off at the time I walked back in? And when I leave, for the span of that hour, would the dog "think about" those events that just occurred, or would they stop thinking about it the second I left the room, because their own cue to the anger was me? And could a dog associate an inanimate object with getting in trouble/a correction? Is that how they learn not to exhibit unwanted behaviours?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jennifer Markley on
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Very interesting topic. I think they form some memories--Sage starts drooling the minute we hit the bank parking lot--they always give her bones. I know alot of their association is with smell, and the energy that you give off. My husband swears too that they remember--Sage always gets in the trash, and after she does, she is nowhere to greet us because she knows she's been "bad"...when she's good, she is right there jumping at the door. So, I don't know!
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Permalink Reply by Stephanie on
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I believe their memory is based on routine. They can associate smells with past routines. When my boyfriend and I broke up, I would have bet you money that Bear was missing him because he would walk outside and look into the parking area for his truck. We used to wait outside for him so Bear could run up and greet him when he got home. Did Bear miss him particularly or did Bear miss the routine?
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Permalink Reply by Beth on
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Their memory is a bit more complicated than what you describe (stimulus-response-stored "emotion").
They did a study with a Border Collie who knew over 200 words. They would put three toys in a room, out of sight of the tester (to avoid giving direction subconsciously) and send the dog for a particular toy. She brought back the correct one every time. To make the experiment more complicated, they introduced a new toy and would set it out with two known toys, and then send her for a word she never heard before. She would go to the room, see the two toys she knew and one that was new, realize she'd been given an unfamiliar word and using deductive reasoning, assume it must match with the unfamiliar toy and bring that one back.
Behaviorists now think that a dog has about the intelligence of an average two-year-old human.
In another example, we frequently go to my parents house for Sunday dinner. Molly, my parents' dog, knows it's Sunday because my parents go to church in the morning. Soon after they get back, she starts going to the front window looking for us. On the rare occasion that we don't go over on a Sunday, my parents report that Molly spends several hours checking out the window, then eventually gives up, dejected, and lies around looking sad. That seems to demonstrate fairly clearly that the dog is anticipating a very specific scenario (our arrival) and is able to feel disappointment at the lack of that arrival. That goes well beyond stimulus/response conditioning, as she is apparently able to envision a particular scenario that has not yet happened, anticipate it with excitement, and be disappointed when it does not happen.
Because of this capability for obviously complex thought, we tend to mistakenly give dogs attributes that they lack. One of those is the idea that dogs "understand" they've done "wrong". In Jennifer's example about the garbage, I recently posted a link where a curious owner decided to see if her dog's guilt over strewing garbage was really guilt or just appeasement. So the owner scattered her own garbage on the floor. When the dog walked in and saw it, she instantly looked "guilty": ears down, belly lowered, appeasement waggle. That is not "guilt". It is a dog picking up on your unhappiness and submitting to avoid having you escalate the punishment; the dog is treating you as it would another dog. Even if you THINK you are not angry, you are angry enough for the dog to pick up on it. Remember, if an assistance dog can be trained to warn an unsuspecting owner that she is about to have a seizure by picking up on certain changes in chemical signatures that the human is totally oblivious to, she can certainly tell if you are even a tiny bit upset by your slightly elevated pulse, faster breathing, tenser muscles, etc. If I get annoyed with my husband, Jack immediately comes over to me and starts jumping on me nervously, even if I haven't said a word.
To answer your specific question about leaving a room angry, your dog does not "remember' why you are mad because holding a grudge is beyond a dog's realm of understanding, not because he doesn't necessarily remember the act. A dog's corrections to another dog are lightning fast and instantly moved past. The concept that you would still be mad an hour later is so foreign to a dog that he can't grasp it. Any correction that continues more than about two seconds after the event is no longer a correction and is instead an exercise in dominance (by you over the dog). As an example, we were at the park and my husband unknowingly let Jack barge up on a dog we know in passing. The dog was behind a tree and had found something tasty to eat, and her owner was trying to call her off. The dog absolutely roared at Jack to correct him for trying to steal her food. Jack, socially adept dog that he is, put back his ears and gave a submissive grin and wandered away. A couple seconds later the owner had hauled the dog off the food and she came up to us and Jack ran right over for a greeting as if nothing had happened. That is how corrections happen in the dog world. So when we are angry at our dog, they may associate it with the action they are doing at the time our anger first hits, but anything after that is lost on the dog.
Hope that makes sense. I think I started to ramble. Sorry!
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Permalink Reply by Carla on
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So if a dog can anticipate a specific scenario, as you highlight in your example of your parents dog for Sunday dinner, wouldn't it stand to reason that a dog could also anticipate getting in trouble for something that he/she had gotten in trouble for in the past?
And a secondary question, let's say the dog chewed on something, got in trouble for it (while he/she was caught in the act, so they made the connection between the behaviour and correction) and then was removed from the room for a period of time. When the dog was brought back into the room with the chewed object, would they "remember" the correction at the point of seeing the chewed upon object? Or would they only associated me AND the chewed object together with the correction?
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For your second question, yes they can remember a bad feeling associated with an object. Jack was a tissue chewer as an older puppy. I would tell him "No!" and take the tissue from him. If I tried to set him up by putting a tissue on the floor, he would studiously look away from the tissue. "Must not look, must not look, it is an evil temptress!!!" was the expression on his face. They associate interacting with the object with you being mad, if you are able to catch them in the act and not after the fact.
WIth the first scenario, I don't really know if they anticipate it in the way you mean. From the dog's point of view, it's not that doing something is bad. It's that doing something incurs your displeasure, and for a social animal like a dog, the displeasure of the leader is an awful thing. But if you are not there, you can't be displeased. So they might know that if you are standing there and they try to steal food off the counter, say, that you'll be angry and not do it. But they probably won't generalize to understand they should not do it even if you are not there. If you are not there when it happens, how can you be displeased? (from the dog's way of thinking). That's why we teach replacement behaviors. If a puppy chews on a shoe, we take it away and replace it with a toy and praise, praise, praise. We hope that over time, puppy gets a vague uneasy feeling about the shoe, and gets a contented happy feeling about the toy. But just trying to stop a behavior, without replacing it with a highly rewarded replacement behavior, rarely works once you are out of the dog's sight.
Again, remember a dog's reasoning level is similar to that of a two-year-old's. So if a toddler thinks tomorrow is Christmas morning, the toddler can be very excited and wake up anticipating Christmas and feel very disappointed if it's not really Christmas. And a toddler might remember that mommy said not to ever, ever leave the front porch without a grownup. But even though you have taught the toddler not to leave the porch, and even though the toddler can remember when Christmas is coming, would you trust a toddler not to leave the porch? No, because the possibility of future punishment is not usually enough to stop a toddler from doing something he really wants to do. It's too abstract a concept.
Here's one study about dogs looking "guilty."
http://sheltiedoc.blogspot.com/2009/06/do-dogs-feel-guilt.html
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I like that I'm not the only person who tries to "set my dog up" in scenarios that could incriminate her. Casey once grabbed a flour-filled stress ball off the couch (this was when we learned that she could jump on the couch, and we more careful after that point with what we put on there....) and made a big mess chewing it up in the living room (flour all over the floor). I totally caught her in the act and she was corrected for it.
Later, I took the same stress-ball (cleaned up at this point) and put it on the floor with some other toys and she did the exact same thing as you described Jack doing: "I can't look at!!! It's the devil!!!" (In Casey's defense, the stress-ball looked like a toy, so it was an honest mistake, but I couldn't help but correct her when I saw the huge mess she was making. It was just an immediate "WHAT THE @^#$!?!?! reaction to the mess on the floor, lol).
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I've told my husband numerous times that she is only reacting to him, but it's kind of funny that she is never at the door to greet us whenever she enjoys the garbage while we're gone. I do agree that it could be the understanding that she has gotten in trouble in the same situation before and is reacting to that....but she even hides if she's tried to get through the gate but wasn't successful. (She's figured out how to slide the lock over with her paw, then nudge the latch up with her nose--so we have to bungey cord it now too). She's never been punished for that....I think they are way smarter and more rational than what we give them credit for.
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I wanted to add one more thought on memory: it seems to me that dogs have to associate a certain importance to an act to remember it. Jack knows toys by name. Sometimes he'll be playing with a toy (let's use tennis ball as an example). I'll say his name and call him to me, and I'll say "Where's tennis ball? Get tennis ball?" And he'll look at me like "What a great idea. Where IS tennis ball." The ball could be right behind him (he just dropped it) and yet he'll start looking in all the usual places. Is it under the hall table? Behind the toilet? In my crate? Behind the plant stand? Sometimes he'll do two laps of the house, peering hear and there, before coming right back to where he was and spotting it right where he left it, two seconds before I asked for it.
Then on a couple other occasions, he would have a new toy (maybe a marrow bone, or maybe a tennis ball he found all by himself in the park; the found ones tend to be his favorites). If he is playing with it and I offer him a walk, he'll reluctantly drop it at the door. We go for our walk and he's cheerful enough. Now, usually when I turn towards home, he starts to lag because he would like the walk to be longer and doesn't want to go back. But if he has a new toy at home, as soon as he realizes we are heading home he picks up the pace and it's all I can do to keep him from pulling, and when we get to the door and I take off his collar, he instantly charges to the toy he left.
In the first scenario, he was absent-mindedly plyaing and it was not that important, and so he seems to have formed no memory at all of what he was doing. In the second scenario, a thing had importance to him at the time he left it, and as soon as he thinks we are headed home he apparently has the image in his mind of the new toy and exactly where it is in the house.
So it would seem if a dog is not attending to what is happening, the moment is totally gone, as if it never happened, as soon as the dog moves on to something else. I know it's just an anecdote, but that's what it seems like to me.
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This made me think of something we do.
You may be at the doctor's office or amusement park and you look at your watch to check the time. Just as you put your hand down, someone asks you the time and you have to look at it again...as if you don't remember the information you just input into your brain just seconds before.
I wonder if there's any connection to how our brain does this and how theirs does it.
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Permalink Reply by Keri&Merlin(Judy&Alan's Pups) on
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Beth,the comment of the dogs slowing down on walks on the way home really made Me chuckle.Some days the walk really is a crawl home.A dog's memory is one I envy on some days.
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Permalink Reply by shelley power on
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in our house we cannot say dogpark without a very loud chorus.ensuing, so we began to spell it d-o-g-p-a-r-k
well in a day the chorus ensued again....... so now we are calling it the place that shall not be named... no chorus ...YET
the other word they have fixated on is COOKIE doesnt matter if we are talking about ours or theirs......... it gets a loud chorus
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Permalink Reply by Edison on
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A reading recommendation for the really curious: "The Intelligence of Dogs" by Stanley Coren. This book covers canine learning, memory, perceptions, abilities and a smattering of their historical associations with humans. He makes some interesting distinctions, such as the difference between a dog being "intelligent" and "trainable".
Pembroke Welsh Corgis are also mentioned in a list of breeds who are good at memory and learning (certainly Edison remembers every person who has ever given him a treat, every spot outside where he's ever seen a cat) but not so good at problem solving! But of the ~130 dog breeds listed in order of trainability, they're #11. :)
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