Dogs know where their paws end and the world begins, a new study shows, adding our furry companions to a group of animals that, like humans, recognize themselves as entities distinct from their environment.
Called body awareness, this ability is one of the most basic manifestations of self-representation (also known as self-awareness). Human beings develop body awareness very early in life: 5-month-old babies can distinguish their own legs in motion from a video recording of the same action, for example. This ability then develops into more complex ways of distinguishing yourself from those around you.
Previous research has mainly tested species in more complex forms of skill. For example, one of the most famous self-representation tests is the “mirror-brand task”, in which animals are thought to have a more advanced form of self-representation, if they can recognize themselves in a mirror.
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Great monkeys, elephants, dolphins, corvid birds and a “constantly growing list” of species pass this test, said senior author Péter Pongrácz, associate professor in the ethology department at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. But dogs did not have.
Scientists have lost interest in studying species that lacked these complex forms of self-representation, said Pongrácz. But in the new study, he and his team decided to take a “bottom-up approach” and investigate whether dogs show a lower level of self-representation – one that would be ecologically relevant for them.
“Dogs are intelligent, large and fast creatures that move in a complex environment,” Pongrácz told Live Science. “Therefore, body awareness would be theoretically important to them when crossing various obstacles, for example.”
To test canine body awareness, the researchers recruited 32 dogs and conducted a task “the body as an obstacle”. This test had previously been performed only on elephants and children.
The dogs had to pick up and give an object to the owner while standing on a small mat; however, the object was attached to the rug so that the dog had to leave the rug to lift the object (and the rug). In other words, their bodies served as an obstacle for the task at hand, and dogs needed to deliberately move that obstacle to complete the task. The researchers took into account other factors, such as fear-inducing conditions, that could cause the dog to get off the rug or give up on the task, said Pongrácz.
“When dogs pulled the toy, it also started to lift the mat – so the dog felt that the mat was shaking under its paws while pulling the toy,” said Pongrácz. “In this scenario, the dogs quickly left the mat, usually still holding the toy in their mouth; then they handed it over to the owner.”
The researchers found that dogs got off the carpet more often and faster when the object was attached to the carpet than when the object was attached to the ground, which the researchers used for comparison purposes. This is “the first evidence that dogs may be able to understand the connection between their own body and the environment through the feedback effect of their own actions,” said Pongrácz. The dogs also showed other basic components of self-representation, including the ability to recognize their own odor, awareness of body size and episodic memory, or personal memories of specific events, according to the study.
Now, the team hopes to continue investigating self-representation in dogs – for example, to see if other factors influence this ability in individual animals.
The results were published Thursday (February 18) in the journal Scientific Reports.