Does your dog remember what you did?

The Christian Science Monitor:

Think back to what you ate for breakfast this morning. Did you picture yourself in your kitchen and visualize the plate in front of you to remember exactly what you ate?

That’s called an episodic memory – a memory of a particular event that happened at a specific time and place, as opposed to a semantic memory, which refers to more general knowledge or rules that someone understands.

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Not only that, but the dogs aren’t even remembering actions that they themselves have done. And, with the delay before being asked to imitate, “I think it removes certain possible confounds, like muscle memory,” Thomas Zentall, a psychologist studying the cognitive behaviors of animals at the University of Kentucky who also was not involved in the research, says in a phone interview with the Monitor.

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Laurie Santos, a psychologist studying comparative cognition at Yale University who was not involved in the study, agrees that the research is “clever,” but she adds that there are remaining questions about what the dogs actually remember about their owners’ actions. “For example, do dogs really experience this event as a specific episode involving a particular person at a particular place,” she writes in an email to the Monitor. “Do dogs’ memories have the “who, what, where, when” quality of human memories. I think the current research is an excellent first step, but that it only opens new questions concerning the richness of dogs’ memories.”

Read the whole story: The Christian Science Monitor