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Imitation In Dogs Matches Humans and Apes
sciencehabit writes "The next time your dog digs a hole in the backyard after watching you garden, don't punish him. He's just imitating you. A new study reveals that our canine pals are capable of copying our behavior as long as 10 minutes after it's happened. The ability is considered mentally demanding and, until this discovery, something that only humans and apes were known to do."
Stop chewing on your wife's best shoes and the dog will stop doing that too! Oh and also don't chew on the sofa cushions either.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
I know i shouldn't kiss the girl that owns him
I did not copy that song! I Swear! It was my dog!
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
"Doggie see, doggie do" just doesn't have the same catch as "monkey see, monkey do".
Especially the "doggie do[o]" part...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Er... parrots?
I've seen a scientific documentary that shows how crows can learn just by looking at other fellows and imitate them to solve practical problems.
Human, apes and dogs are hardly the only species to do so.
my old dog watched me open the fridge one day, and carried on doing it and emptying the contents until a child lock was put on it
P.sure that evolution is about retention of particular traits more suited to the environment. Whether that environment is dominated by non-organic or organic processes, and whether those organic processes are floral, bestial or human, is irrelevant. So, a breeding programme is an excellent demonstration of evolution at a fast pace.
Dogs didn't evolve from wolves. Dogs were bred from wolves. There is a world of difference. And that breeding program was designed to maximize certain aspects of canine intelligence. A dog is a man-made creation that has no relation to evolutionary development. In this light, the fact that dogs exhibit mimicry while almost no other animal does is not surprising.
The difference is purely semantic. The difference is that dogs didn't evolve from wolves through natural selection, they evolved via human selection (which may still considered natural), but it's still an evolution.
So this is why I see many fat dogs lately..
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Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Dogs have been scrutinizing us humans for 400 centuries, so they're experts at understanding our moods and behaviors.
My cat imitates my actions, but then again he's a rare breed that has a reputation for acting more like dogs than cats. He's a Turkish Van who barks (short, loud verbalizations to get my attention instead of the traditional "meow"), fetches (some other cats can be taught to fetch... Turkish Vans teach their owners to play fetch), and generally exhibits the behavior of a pack animal that wants the favor and attention of the alpha animal (the human).
As for imitative behavior, he loves to watch me wash dishes. Turkish Vans are fascinated by water (in nature they swim for fun and fish for food), so he has to be on the counter watching whenever I'm washing dishes. He sees me apparently rubbing my "paws" together under the stream of water, and if I turn to put the dish in the drying rack, he will invariably start pawing at the stream of water, and then rubbing his paws together under the stream. He's invariably very confused because he doesn't understand what this accomplishes, but he keeps doing it because he sees me doing it.
Cats have the intelligence to imitate behavior, but they don't exhibit it because most domesticated cats do not have the pack mentality. They do their own thing unless there is a reward for doing your thing. You hear about people teaching their cats to flush the toilet, but that's usually because they're fascinated by the "reward" of getting to watch the whirlpool. Turkish Vans and dogs, however, will do things because they see you doing it and they want to win your approval by doing what you do.
Mimicry is perfectly standard behaviour for animals. There have been studies on how parents teach their offspring how to hunt dating back decades. This applies on land, on/under water and in the air. Most of the studies I have heard about involve mammals or birds, I can't remember any involving reptiles, fish or (in particular) insects. Some larger spiders may have this ability - ones large enough to eat small ground-nesting birds for instance
.
The article itself is more about adapting behaviour by watching humans and that is self-limiting, apart from speech there is not much useful a bird can learn that way. I have a neighbour who used to look after the garden before it was turned into a lawn. Back then he had a fan - a blackbird which would hang around when he was digging, waiting for worms to be unearthed. It presumably recognised my neighbour as non-threatening and the digging as the same thing it would do but on steroids.
I was attacked by a goose a few years back. We were sitting outside and someone had fun throwing it scraps, closer and closer to me. It tried to drive me off by driving at me while hissing and flapping its wings. I joined in the fun by advancing on it, hissing back and 'flapping' my arms the same way. Communication was achieved, goose withdrew to a safer distance.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
-1 Overrated?
The only reason a moderator would ever give a 0 scored comment a "-1 Overrated" moderation is if they disagreed with the comment and used the moderation as a method to attack the poster. They are admitting that they don't think it is a troll, flamebait, offtopic, or redundant, but they didn't want others to see it. This is pretty cowardly stuff right here.
I fully expect this comment to be modded -1 Disagree (a/k/a Overrated).
Why does the moderation system even propose Overrated for comments at 0 or 1?
You're right. The overrated mod is -1 Overrated.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Dogs are far smarter than they let on. It's not just mimicry, they can talk, read, write, and operate heavy machinery. The only reason we don't ever see them doing this is because mankind would put them to work and tax them. I don't blame them really.
Pretty much every daily task we do is mimicked, no one is born knowing how to use a shovel or how to put an object in a box until they are shown. In most cases for humans we only have to be shown once and then we can do it the rest of our lives but we have a little more thinking muscle to work with than a dog. Its not too surprising that they have the capacity to copy actions, what is really cool is that they have to map the action from a two legged human action to a four legged dog action. I'll bet the dogs that can do this can be taught a number of unusual tricks. Maybe even a dog version of sign language, dogs already communicate with body language to people (throw the ball, feed me) why not teach them how to express very specific wants or needs with a set of actions. Once they get the hang of that you could teach them to convey information that is not dog centric, the dog soldiers of Starship Troopers aren't that much of a stretch anymore.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Was wondering what the hell those dogs eat. They're always loafing around the house, stinking up the place with their nasty farts.
Oh. Now I get it.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Still won't do my taxes.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
My 2 anecdotes are about chickens. I keep a couple of bantams, more as pets than anything else.
At a stage the one hen hatched a batch of chicks. Because the chicks can't fly or hop much yet (I've seen adult chickens fly a remarkable distance quite gracefully, and hop over obstacles 2-3 times their height with a single wing flap, much like a human would use his arms for balance when hopping over something), they can't get onto the perch in their coop for the night, so mom and chicks slept on the ground. There is however a ramp-like plank up which they could walk to reach the perch, if they where so inclined. So when they where about 3 weeks old I decided to teach them to use the ramp: I made one chick from the clutch run up the ramp (running away from my hands, which shielded it in all the directions it was not supposed to go. From there on all chicks slept on the perch at night.
The other anecdote concerns moving from a dish-tipe water bowl to a old milk jug fitted with Chick Nipples for drinking needs (click the link if you dare....). All I had to do is activate said nipples by hand so that they could see it releases water. Now they are happily drinking from this arrangement. OK, it could be argued that they peck at shiny stuff or water droplets in any case, and would learn in this manner, but still...
Now chickens are not the most intelligent animals, I would be the first to agree. But they are a LOT smarter than what people normally give them credit for.
Plus, they taste like chicken.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
My cats, both of them will attempt to do stuff like reach for the door knob to open closed doors. They are round knobs so they can't do it. But they know what they need to do. One of them has opened a bag of litter and knocked it over when we were out so she could do her business in it after the door to the room with her litter tray blew shut in the wind (I kid you not).
Animals are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, a lot of the tests they "fail" is likely because they are simply differently motivated.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I've seen my friend's horses try to unlock the stall doors after the human locks the stall door, with disturbing accuracy. This doesn't seem unusual to me.
So, you're saying he is anti-semantic?
No brain, no pain.
Thia is what passes for research these days.
Did you know that angry people are more likely to yell?
Did you know that 87.3% of facts in internet articles are made up?
No brain, no pain.
Sorry AC, but no Cro-Magnon ever sat down, looked at a wolf and said, "I'm hungry, I'm going to build me a chihuahua." Dogs evolved from wolves for several thousand years all on their own before humans took over the process. They first needed a wolf that would allow handling and confinement, and which was small enough to be able to feed. This is why populations of feral dogs almost all look the same everywhere in the world, that's the natural state of dogs before breeders started in on them.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
My friend's dog is always getting yelled at over voice chat because instead of going to bed at a normal time, she hops off the bed and watches him play Neverwinter. He plays on his TV with a controller and headset so the dog knows that he's playing with the controller. So she always licks it and bites at it because she wants to play too. One time he got up for a second and his character basically had a seisure that involved running around and falling off a cliff in game and it turns out she was messing with the buttons with her tongue. So she's not very good at Neverwinter but at least she tries to imitate him.
I'll have to remember that...
It is a measure of human hubris that we fail to note the fact of animal intelligence that leads to their mimicing us. Another common example of this is the tendency of cats to become vocal and develop novel utterances as a result of observing human speech and interaction. Any keen observer will note that cats. left on their own will not develop such behavior. Upon observing and interacting with humans, at first a cat will simply meow in an utterly feline way, but then it will begin to experiment with varous gargling and purr/meow vocalizations. Finally, of course, there's the famous "silent meow", performed solely for the benefit of a human audience.
I had a border collie when I was a kid that would figure out just about anything. Opening doors, the refrigerator, digging up holes (and filling them in after getting an earful from my dad)... The most impressive thing she ever did though was picking vegetables from the garden. She could smell when they were ripe, and one year all the cantaloupe seeds that were planted sprouted. We had well over 400 cantaloupe that year, and it was very time consuming to pick them all. We would wake up in the morning with tens of fruit left at the back door, with teeth marks gently pressed in the rind from my dog.
She also tried to pick other vegetables, with varying levels of success. The funniest was tomatoes, as she just couldn't manage to be gentle enough and always ended up leaving them semi-squished on the back step.
Parrots are intelligent enough to watch what you do and copy your actions to duplicate the effect.
You cannot leave keys near my parrot as he will get hold of them and try the keys in the padlocks on his cage until he unlocks them. He knows this as he's seen me do it.
Cro-magnon killed some wolves, saw the pups and took them back to cave; food is food. Eventually someone liked them enough to keep around (keep pests down, alert to sounds, are cute, etc) and the ones that bred and stayed friendly and neonatic (shorter snouts, less aggressive) kept breeding.
I drank what? -- Socrates
He thinks he's people!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I think there are a lot of dog trainers who are "positive reinforcement only" and probably ties into some kinds of animal welfare philosophy somehow.
We went to dog training at the local humane society with our 10 month old rescue (half pit bull, half great dane, 95 lbs now at 2 years) and the focus was 100% on positive reinforcement.
We found that for some behaviors it was just not effective -- ie, barking out the window at passers by. It worked well for some things like sit, stay, and come, but for behaviors that the dog did you didn't want them to do it didn't accomplish anything.
We hired an in-home trainer recommended by friends and she recommended some simple "punitive" steps we could take -- grabbing the scruff and muzzle during an unwanted behavior and saying NO and if repeated, kenneling the dog and not letting him out until he stopped barking. She also recommended a pinch collar which did a lot to control pulling and lunging, although you still can't put a squirrel in front of this dog without some lunging.
We found that the punitive behavior was MUCH more effective at controlling unwanted behavior than trying to teach an alternative behavior when the dog was so strongly motivated to do something we didn't want.
I never got to the shock collar stage, although I have been tempted a couple of times. As the dog has grown older some of the annoying behavior has tapered and I think our training helped dampen a lot of unwanted behavior.
A fully grown wolf eats too much for a Cro-magnon to keep happy. Predators generally taste nasty, and an injured wolf or one protecting its litter could take down a human, so that explanation has never made a whole lot of sense to me. If you're desperate enough that you'd eat a wolf then you probably don't have enough spare food to maintain its pups.
The speculation that I've read most recently from dog behaviorists (because there isn't enough evidence in the archeological record) is that solitary wolves started out scavenging human leftovers. Wolves are naturally scavengers and opportunists anyway, especially when they don't have a pack to increase their hunting efficiency, and young abandoned or orphaned social animals can transfer their relationship needs to other species. They feel that wolves chose us, rather than the opposite.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Very early on in the process of dogs coming out of wolves...it may have been more about natural selection. (Maybe) Early man only allowed the wolves that were tame to hang around...and it was beneficial for the tamer wolves. It seems when you select for tameness....you get more than just that as you go along. I am sure everyone has already heard of ths.
Makes sense. Just about every village had a garbage pile nearby (good for archaeologists) and the age of dogs splitting off from wolves parallels human transition from nomadic to sedentary.
I drank what? -- Socrates
The difference is purely semantic. The difference is that dogs didn't evolve from wolves through natural selection, they evolved via human selection (which may still considered natural), but it's still an evolution.
I've seen a few articles, like this one that suggests wolves domesticated humans ... or this one that wolves/dogs domesticated themselves ... to co-exist.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
My dogs LIE. Really. If they whine and point their noses at the door, they get let out. If they whine and point their noses at the kitchen, sometimes they get bones and sometimes we just say STFU we gave you enough bones already. So........they point at the door and you get up and when you are almost at the door they run back to the kitchen and point at the bones.
Cats are a product of their upbringing and environment, like many critters, people included.
Cats that grow up in very active households tend to be very sociable towards strangers (same for "shop" cats). Cats that grow up spending their lives with someone who doesn't socialize much, tend to be more skittish of strangers. Cats that grow up by themselves tend to be more sociable towards humans; cats that grow up with another cat tend to be more social with the other cats (playing, following, snoozing, etc.) and more aloof to humans.
Cats can be passive, cats can be assertive. I dated someone whose cat decided that when we were making out on the couch, that was a swell time to climb up and sit on her back and purr and knead her back.
I've known people who had cats who would play fetch; it's not that unusual - and my cat came when he was called, usually because he knew that it meant he'd get a warm lap, petting, or ear/chin scratching.
Please help metamoderate.
Lying sack of crap. No one is going to serve a dog that costs $600-$1000 in a restaurant. If you paid a couple hundred dollars for a plate of what you were told was Xolo it was probably actually goat, or maybe a roadkill mutt. And cats don't taste much like rabbit, either wild ones (bad tasting) or tame ones (delicious).
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
something that only humans and apes were known to do
Octopuses, Crows and various birds, potentially mice.
A dog is a man-made creation that has no relation to evolutionary development.
Seriously, that opinion deserves to be called out as inexcusable ignorance in this day and age. Did you actually listen in school?
Evolution happens when animals breed. It doesn't matter if it's horses breeding in the wild, dogs in a kennel, hamsters up my ass or mice in a laboratory. DNA is exchanged, genes are mixed, errors occur, changes result and that's evolution. Stop going to church group and pick up a book.
Humans Evolved from Apes
Actually no, that's a common misconception. Humans and apes both evolved, along different paths, from a common ape-like ancestor. That is, we evolved from "primates", not "apes". People often equate the two, but they have different meanings. "Primate" is like an umbrella term. "Ape" is a specific type of primate.
Actually, the fact that people commonly say "humans evolved from apes" has been picked up by some tricky Creationists. Their argument goes: "If humans evolved from apes, then why are apes still around? Surely they'd be gone, replaced by us!"
Once you understand the "ape" thing is just a mistake in language, and people should really be saying "primate", then of course that Creationist argument has no meaning. They just say that to try to appeal to the odd individual who might go, "oh yeah.. they dun got a point!"