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Dogs know when they don't know
In the field of comparative psychology, researchers study animals in order to learn about the evolution of various traits and what this can tell us about ourselves. At the DogStudies lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, project leader Juliane Bräuer studies dogs to make these comparisons. In a recent study published in the journal Learning & Behavior, Bräuer and colleague Julia Belger, now of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, explore whether dogs have metacognitive abilities -- sometimes described as the ability to "know what one knows" -- and in particular whether they are aware of what information they have learned and whether they need more information.
To test this, the researchers designed an apparatus involving two V-shaped fences. A reward, either food or a toy, would be placed by one researcher behind one of the two fences while another researcher held the dog. In some cases, the dog could see where the reward was placed, while in others the dog could not. The researchers then analyzed how frequently the dogs looked through a gap in the fence before choosing an option. The question was whether, like chimps and humans, the dog would "check" through the gap when he or she had not seen where the reward was placed. This would indicate that the dog was aware that he or she did not know where the reward was -- a metacognitive ability -- and would try to get more information before choosing a fence.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @10:21PM
You've never met our dog, then again, she was brought up surrounded by a tribe of cats..
We've an alpha female cat in our tribe, but, amusingly, the dog is now apparently next in line. The alpha female doesn't defer to her, but the other cats do and as she has also figured out that humans only exist to serve the furry little feline overlords, and that now she has been officially 'adopted' into the feline hierarchy, she demands equal treatment.
Her brother, daft bugger that he is, belongs to a cat-less relative, and we look after him quite a lot when the relative is away. It's amazing how 'cat like' his attitude to the rest of the universe has become over the years, again, thanks to the influence of our feline tribe. It's fun watching a large (mostly) Labrador cross and the cats chase a laser pointer dot around the room...total bloody chaos, but fun, the thing about this is that while the cats will happily pounce on the little red dot when it magically appears, he knows when the game is about to begin the second I pick up the laser pointer (admittedly, we had a tomcat many years ago who, after studying the laser pointer game for a couple of minutes, rather than chase the dot, he launched an all-out attack on the hand wielding the pointer...a truly calculating cat.)
As you might have guessed, a mainly cat person here, but we have had a number of dogs as well over the years, the words dumb and subservient have never applied to any of them. I might have just given you subservient, but they've only been so in the narrow sense that they knew where they fitted in as far as the household 'pack' was concerned.
Leaving our lot aside, there was the dog that one of my uncles had back in the 70's, she only ever would allow three people to clap her, my uncle and my father and mother, the fun part was that she tolerated my cousins, her other nominal 'pack' members, and would quite happily defend the pram containing the oldest daughter's new born son against all strangers (which led to an amusing incident involving a priest visiting my aunt..my father joked about the dog being Voltaire reincarnated), but she would never obey any of my cousins. She wasn't feral, but when she went wandering, her home range was something like 2 mi², territorial range 10 mi², the local dog catcher never managed to get her once in her 10+ years on the planet, not for want of trying, but as she was both very smart and a cross greyhound, he was at a major disadvantage.
So dogs, yes, I've seen the slobbering idiot dogs who fawn on their master's every command, but I've owned terriers who could teach master-classes on craftiness to foxes, and I've also seen (and petted) the Chihuahua who 'ran' with the feral cats from the colony in the builders merchant's yard in south London¹ back in the mid 90's (By day, someone's lap dog, by night, the fugliest counterfeit cat in the whole of the Tooting/Collier's Wood badlands...)
¹No longer there, from Google Maps it's now a Lidl and the obligatory ubiquitous shitty high density housing, ah well, sic transit gloria mundi..