Remember, it’s #FidoFriday.

Remember, it’s #FidoFriday.

Fugazza et al, recently published work demonstrating that dogs have episodic-like memory. What’s episodic memory? It’s your personal recollection of an event, but not to be confused with autobiographical memory. Semantic memory is recollection of facts, e.g., knowing the capital of Iowa. To distinguish between episodic memory and autobiographical memory, remember autobiographical memory includes semantic memory, e.g., the names of the places in your memories.

In this study, dogs were trained to mimic the trainer when the trainer gave the command “do it”. It’s called Do as I Do training. To get at episodic memory, the dogs were then trained to lie down after watching the owner do a task, like touch an umbrella or jump over a chair. Then the dogs were surprised by being asked, “do it”. They had to remember what was done 1 minute earlier and 1 hour earlier. As with many of us, the dogs did much better at the shorter delay of 1 minute.

You can read more about memory types here:

Episodic Memory: Definition and Examples

http://www.livescience.com/43682-episodic-memory.html

The full article is here:

Recall of Others’ Actions after Incidental Encoding Reveals Episodic-like Memory in Dogs

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)31142-3

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/your-dog-remembers-more-you-think