TORONTO – A new study suggests that dogs, like humans, are self-aware and probably understand the consequences of their actions.
The results, published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday, say that dogs are able to display “body awareness”, a manifestation of self-representation.
Self-representation is a concept that describes how you look at yourself and the image you have in your mind – a construction of your own identity.
Part of this concept is physical “body awareness” or “self-awareness” – a recognition of how your body physically relates to a space. The study said that babies up to five months old are able to recognize their moving legs as an example.
“Body awareness, which is ‘the ability to keep in mind information about one’s own body, as an explicit object, in relation to other objects in the world’ can be considered as one of the fundamental elements of self-representation,” the study says.
And while it is generally accepted that most species possess a certain basic sense of self-perception, “body awareness” is a distinct feature applied to humans, and scientists have tried to find out if animals possess it.
Dogs have a “well-proven account of complex cognitive abilities,” such as empathy and social learning, which makes them an ideal research topic, the study says.
The scientists tested 54 dogs by placing them on a small carpet and giving them orders to pick up and give an object to their owner. The objects were either attached to the carpet or to the ground under the carpet, under the test conditions.
In the first test, the researchers attached a ball to the mattress and asked the dog to give the ball to their owner. Because the ball was attached to the carpet, the dog could not bring the ball to the owner unless he first got off the carpet.
Many of the dogs realized the problem and got off the carpet to complete the task – showing the feeling of being “body conscious”, says the study.
In the second test, the researchers attached the ball to the ground under the mattress and gave the dog orders to give the ball to their owner. This was to test whether the dogs understood the difference between “there is an obstacle” and “their body is the obstacle”.
When the ball was attached to the ground, the dogs left the mattress less often, which the study suggests show that dogs recognize when their body is or is not an obstacle to the command given to them.
The researchers say the dogs showed “the first convincing evidence of body awareness by understanding the consequences of their own actions in a species in which a higher capacity for self-representation has not previously been found.”
The researchers said the study also showed that dogs could record their own action and consequences – and separate them from other external stimuli.
Researchers believe their findings will help them test “body awareness” in other species of animals that go further.