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It's the month of October and the Nobel Prize season. The announcement of the medical award was announced today. Unlike the winners James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo, most of us will probably not accept such a reward in Stockholm. Our beloved pet dogs are not, though the owners swear that their four-legged friends are geniuses. Of course, dogs are smart, at least when it's about working with humans. But pigs, for example, are smarter than you think. This is affirmed by a new newspaper published today in the journal Learning and behaviorwho asks: "In what way are dogs special?"
The project began when Stephen Lea, professor emeritus at Exeter University, was editor of the British newspaper Animal behavior. While the newspaper has published articles on mental abilities of species as diverse as pheasants, mongooses and flies, he explains that much of the articles in his office dealt with dog cognition.
"By working as a publisher [and] Seeing all of this research, I really felt that our collective had been a little over-excited about the dogs' intelligence, "he says.
There are obvious reasons for that. While dogs were topics of cognitive research as early as the 1800s (does Pavlov's name tell you anything?), Lea says that throughout the 20th century, researchers have focused on primates and d & # 39; 39; other species and have stopped interested in the question of what dogs knew (and how) Then, in the 1990s, scientists began to be interested again in the same. species so present in human life. However, in search of new research, he wondered if the dogs had been boosted as particularly intelligent.
To try to determine if the dogs were actually animal genies, he and his coauthor Britta Osthaus compared more than 300 existing cognitive studies. They compared dog fitness studies to those of three major groups, in which one could say that dogs fall into this category: carnivores (the fancy term for "carnivores"), social hunters who depend on each other to slaughter their prey and pets. .
What they discovered was that dogs did not seem to stand out from other animals in all categories. There were carnivores, social hunters and pets that could match or surpass dogs in cognitive tests. What was different in dogs was their ability to match animals through these three groups. Hyenas seem to better follow the indications of others. dolphins have better results in self-awareness tests and raccoons are better at physical puzzles. However, no other animal could behave as well in all categories.
"Each species has a unique intelligence," says Lea. What he and Osthaus argue is that "their intelligence is what you expect from an animal that is … recently descended from social hunters … who are carnivores and who have [also] been domesticated, "he says. "There is no other animal that meets these three criteria."
This new study takes an unusual approach to cognition studies, says Daphna Buchsbaum, senior research scientist at the Canine Cognition Lab at the University of Toronto. "As human beings, I often think that we consider animal cognition through what makes them so similar or different from us," she says. Here, Lea and Osthaus compare the cognitive knowledge of dogs with that of other animals, with enlightening results. Even in their proposal that dogs are not only smart, she says, there may be "something interesting and exceptional" about dogs that allows them to sit in the middle of these three categories .
There are conflicting theories about why dogs are good at being good, whether because of domestication, the evolutionary history of pack hunting, or for other reasons. Lea says that no one knows exactly why dogs are what they are, but this article raises more questions about their way of thinking and future research directions for other animals that do not have them. not as widely studied as dogs. Studying other carnivores – especially endangered species like the African painted dog or the dhole, which may disappear before we can understand them – could offer a whole new window on dog cognition before domestication and these animals themselves.
As for dogs, Buchsbaum says that "the human environment is their natural environment, and this is not the case for most of these other animals". and dogs play a role in our lives, from helping people with disabilities to detecting cancer.
So, are dogs smarter than other animals? Well, maybe not. But they are probably more present in our lives, says Buchsbaum. This is a reason to study their brains. Another reason, says Lea, is that they can take us far in animal cognition studies because they are naturally comfortable around us. They make good test subjects. Nevertheless, he says, this new document highlights other species that require further study. Carnivores in general, for example, have not been the subject of much research. Without these studies, there is no way to know how dogs are measured. "We would know a lot more about dogs if we knew more about the intelligence of other species that are not dogs," he says.
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