Let's talk about canine cognition: Our dogs are more human than they seem
The people who have the can of having dogs are amazed with the skills and with the "intelligence" of these animals. And for our fortune there is a science that is responsible for studying such HUMAN behavior.
I will start by clarifying that it is cognition
It is the faculty of a living being for the knowledge of the information, the acquired knowledge and subjective characteristics that allow to value the information. It consists of processes such as learning, reasoning, memory, problem solving, decision making, feelings. The human being has the ability to know all the aforementioned processes.
However, the concept of cognitive process also applies to social functions, as well as to interests or unconscious ones. Therefore, the concept has been approached from different perspectives, including neurology, and psychology.
Characteristics of cognition
In its broadest and etymological sense, cognition refers to everything that belongs or is related to knowledge.
Cognition is therefore the accumulation of all the information that people acquire throughout their lives through learning and experiences.
More concretely, the most accepted definition of cognition today is the ability of living beings to process information based on perception.
That is, through the capture of stimuli from the outside world through the senses, the person initiates a series of procedures that allow the acquisition of information and that is defined as cognition.
Cognition is therefore a process that is performed by the brain structures of people and involves the performance of more than one activity that allows learning to develop.
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Cognition in dogs
The study of cognition in dogs involves exploring their mental processes of attention, memory, and understanding of signals to create new knowledge and use those processes for problem solving. Sometimes the results of studies in dogs are debatable by the thin line that divides true cognition from mere behavioral changes.
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was perhaps one of the leading scholars of cognition, although he assumed that this ability was only applicable to humans because animals lacked the ability of abstract symbolic reasoning. Currently, there are sectors in society that doubt the cognitive capacity of animals.
However, any individual uses cognition when he is able to solve a new problem based on the processing of already existing information obtained by other experiences.Since the capacity for cognition probably evolved in response to the selective pressures of the environment5 it is expect that cognitive expression will be variable at a qualitative and quantitative level between animal species and man.
Ability of the dog to interpret human signals
The dog shares with the wolf more than 99% of its genetic map, 7 however evolution has selected different abilities in these two species. In this sense Virányi et al. Showed that only dogs are able to use human signals to find food. In one experiment a dog or a wolf was placed facing a human, which had two opaque plastic cans on the sides. While the animal watched, the human hid food under one of the boats and later pointed it out.
The results showed that only the dog followed the human's signals to choose between the boats. Recent studies showed that in the same paradigm of choice, dogs follow the signals of the human even if he tricks him by pointing to an empty transparent boat, or one that has less food than the other. This ability of the dog to use human signals is observable from six weeks of age, so it refers to an innate response, however, training allows dogs to improve that capacity. For example, pet dogs (without training) or dogs trained for sports that require a constant interaction with the human (obedience, agility), resort to eye contact with the human when they are facing a difficult problem or unsolvable.
On the contrary, dogs that are used and trained to be autonomous and make decisions before new environments (guide dogs, rescue dogs), usually avoid eye contact and solve a problem by themselves to the point of sometimes ignoring human demands. For example, a guide dog trained in pedestrian crossings where sidewalks have angles of 90 °, tends to falter when exposed to a cruise with different angles or with uneven handicaps. Faced with this problem, the dog uses other elements in the environment to identify the pedestrian crossing, ignoring even if the human encourages it to advance in the wrong way. Canine training has allowed us to obtain evidence about the dog's cognitive ability to learn to interpret human signals and respond in a conditioned way to them. In addition, canine training allows the human to challenge the physical and mental abilities of dogs, such as jumping obstacles and running at full speed or memorizing objects and solving problems, respectively.
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