“I remember
the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again”
Let the memory live again”
The words may be from the musical Cats, but with new research about dogs’ memories, someone may want to create a new musical.
A recent article in The Washington Post reports on research findings that dogs
may have episodic-like memory similar to humans. While they can’t actually know what the dogs
are thinking (after all, The Secret Life
of Pets is only a movie), their research shows that dogs can remember what their humans do even if
the dog doesn’t need to know the action.
The study, published by Current Biology, tested the dogs’ memory by first training the
dogs to “do what I do” and then, after the dogs performed correctly, increased
the time between the action and telling them to do it. Two time intervals were
tested: 1 minute and 1 hour.
While the dogs memory was better after only one minute (60%
of dogs performed the action) and did decrease after an hour, a number of them
(35%) were still able to recall and perform the action they were initially
taught to imitate.
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