Canine cognitive skills: How intelligent is your dog? | Animal Welfare Magazine

Discover how canine cognitive skills are compared to those of a human child. Learn about dog intelligence and what research reveals about their mental skills.

How intelligent are our dogs? If you base your opinion on YouTube videos, it is easy to conclude that they are extremely intelligent. They do everything from surfing and skating, to hitting the buttons that produce sound to answer questions. They seem to be the equivalent of four feet humans in leather coats, at least sometimes. Let’s take a closer look at canine cognitive skills and discover how intelligent our dogs are!

How research on canine cognition has evolved

The scientific study of the greatest mental skills in dogs is a relatively recent phenomenon. In early 1900, Ivan Pavlov studied the dog’s ability to learn simple reflections. However, researchers were greatly delayed in the study of more complex canine cognitive skills. As recently as the end of the 1980s, there were practically no psychological laboratories specifically dedicated to studying canine cognition. Despite the little level of scientific research, people continued wondering how intelligent their dogs were. They questioned what dogs could understand and the limits of their ability to learn and solve problems.

Fast fact: The researchers finally changed the scientific climate around canine cognitive research. Today, approximately three dozen laboratories worldwide study the mental skills of dogs.

These include university laboratories in Duke, Emory, Arizona, Yale and Texas Tech in the United States, as well as laboratories throughout Europe, including Max Planck, Eötvös Lorend, Padua, Milan and Vienna, to name only a few.

With all this research dedicated to studying dog minds, have we achieved any important advance in our understanding how our best friends think?

Studies show that dogs are as intelligent as young children

Perhaps an advance, when it comes to our ability to evaluate the cognitive ability of dogs, arose in the early 1990s. At that time, I realized that a way of learning about the limits of canine mental skills was to use tests that researchers had already developed to evaluate babies and young children, and modify them for dogs.

The idea was simple: if a dog could pass the test, it clearly demonstrated that mental ability. In addition, many of these tests are described in terms of human mental age, which allows researchers to compare the cognitive skills of dogs with those of young humans.

This led some researchers to begin to think that canine cognitive skills could really imitate those of human children, which has led to a new interesting research.

My own initial studies that use this technique began when I looked at canine language learning. I started modifying MacArthur’s communicative development inventory. It contains several tests to evaluate the ability of language and communication in very young children, including the use of words and gestures.

Using only family dogs, which were not explicitly trained to understand language and gestures, I concluded that the mental capacity of dogs is equivalent to that of a human child from 2 to 2 and a half years. This means that the average dog can understand about 165 words, including hand signals and signals.

Fast fact: Additional work made me believe that smarter dogs could have mental skills similar to those of a child from 2½ to 3 years. This meant that they could learn at least 200 words.

At that time, I noticed that we really didn’t know how far we could push a dog’s abilities until we try to train it for the maximum understanding of human language.

Building canine vocabulary

If my estimates were correct, then it should be possible to train a bright dog to develop a vocabulary of several hundred words. A few years later, the researchers confirmed that a border collie called Ricco had a language capacity within that range. Ricco had been especially trained to expand his vocabulary.

Since then, several other researchers, such as retired psychologist John Pilley and his dog Hunter I have tried to see how much language a dog can learn.

Fast fact: We must not judge the typical linguistic capacity of our dogs through the achievements of a wise canine as the hunter. After all, we would not judge the average musical capacity of an human child based on Mozart’s achievements.

Canine cognition that goes beyond language

Given the results that suggest that the linguistic capacity of our dogs is more or less equivalent to that of a human child, researchers began to wonder if other canine mental skills were similar. After all, when we measure children’s intellects, we generally find synchronous development. For example, if a child’s vocabulary is at a level of 5 years, then his mathematical ability will also be at a level of 5 years, as well as his ability to write, memorize, draw and solve problems.

The researchers found that this was a good approach. For example, a human of 2 to 3 years can repeat the sequence of numbers from one to ten per memory. However, it generally understands the concept of counting well enough to list lots of three to five objects. The research has shown that this is exactly the range of elements that dogs can count.

Fast fact: In the formal recovery tests, the minimum number of items that a dog must be able to tell to do it well is three. This is so that I can remember how many ducks have fallen, in what order and where they are.

Once we accept that we can compare a dog’s mind with that of a child from 2 to 3 years, we can begin to explore other aspects of a dog’s mental life. In humans, for example, a systematic development of emotions and emotional expression takes place.

While a very young child can feel pleasure, pain, anger, disgust and love, complex social emotions such as guilt, shame or pride require a child to be almost four years old. So, if you want to know if your dog feels guilty after having committed some transgression, your best estimate is that it does not. This is the way in which the most recent scientific data seems to be pointing out.

So how intelligent our dogs are?

First, we must limit our conclusions to mental and intellectual canine cognitive skills. In terms of social awareness, given their interest in sex, domain and social interactions, dogs are more as human teenagers when it comes to mental functioning.

However, recent research suggests that dogs have cognitive skills similar to those of humans from 2 to 3 years, especially for language, problem solving and concept formation. This means that if you are raising a problem or teaching your dog that would be too difficult for a human child to solve or learn, it is likely to be beyond your dog’s ability. Mentally challenging your dog is important for your happiness and well -being, just make sure the activity is within its intellectual reach!

Chaser – Canine Savant

Based on careful and controlled investigation, perhaps the most talented dog linguistically to date was chaser, a border collie owned by a retired psychologist, John Pillay. Chaser had a vocabulary of around 1,000 words, which is the equivalent of what we could expect from a 3 and a half year old child.

Chaser not only understood individual words, but also understood concepts and categories such as “ball”, which can include several elements of different sizes and textures.

However, chaser skills were not easy; They required a lot of training, with Dr. Pilley often spent four or more hours a day working with the dog. Therefore, its research seems likely to exceed the upper limits of what a dog can be trained to understand.

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