A tangential thread to this one would be how dogs (and cats) can hide stuff from humans.
Dog motivations are weird. A dog perfectly capable of using nose and brain to find a treat or a toy might not be motivated to do it. Maybe rather have their human friend show them or keep playing the game instead of finding it. They might forget about it when the game seems to be over. I’m pretty sure my best friend Duke would eventually find it, then hide it from his brother Sami, or whoever or whatever he hides treats from.
Do dogs lack “object permanence” the way a small child does? That is to say, if they can’t see the object anymore, it no longer exists?
Maybe. They demonstrate rudimentary object permanence, about on the level of a 1-2-year-old human.
No. Dogs clearly remember the existence of items taken from view. My friend Duke is very smart. We take away toys and put them places where he can’t see them, but he knows where they are. He’ll go over to a closet door to indicate he wants something in particular. He also sits in front of the refrigerator looking up because he knows we put one of Sami’s toys up there because Duke would just rip it apart and Sami likes his toys to keep squeaking. Sami is not as bright, but both of them know where the carrots are kept in the refrigerator.
I think object permanence is a learned concept. Baby dogs probably lack it just like baby humans.
I’m guessing that it’s hard to test object permanence with a being who can easily smell the location of something he can no longer see.
I imagine that for dogs the world appears very different than it does to us – objects and people and other animals have a kind of glow of scent around them that leaves a fading trail in the air as they move/are moved. We don’t have any language for what that must be like except using words for how things look.
My young dog adores my daughter, who forgot her boots in my mudroom last week. The first time he smelled them there he ran up to her bedroom to see if she was there. And every time he went through the mudroom he sniffed her boots again and wagged happily.
Being the cynical person that I am, I have to believe that there are quite a few dogs who are actually smarter than their owners, but they love them and pretend they are being fooled just to please them.
No doubt dogs perception of the world is different than ours. It’s like the difference between 3 color vision and total color blindness, but more so because of an enhanced sense of smell far better than our own. To some dogs finding a bit of food hidden away is like looking at a Where’s Waldo solution where only Waldo is in color and everything else shades of gray. But I still think object permanence is something learned by experience. The learning process might be more hard-wired in the brain, but I think people born blind understand object permanence by touch, smell, and/or sound, so it’s not something hard-wired to vision.
That’s not cynical. Some dogs just love to play. They can be more interested in playing a game with their human than whatever the dumb human thinks is the object of the game. One behavior I’ve seen over and over again in dogs is ignoring humans. They pretend they don’t hear humans discussing them or other subjects that interest them like food or sleeping. The tell will be in their ears, and sometimes their tails. They can’t help at least a little twitch when they recognize words, especially their own name.
I’ve decided that my yellow lab (<-- that’s him) likes the play, and he can ignore whatever olfactory input he gets for the love of the game.
We walk a fair bit and it gets GodAwful windy around these parts, but Sam can smell a chicken bone … bereft of any discernable meat … from an unimaginably great distance … even when it’s downwind of us.
And it’s obviously not a random find that results from indiscriminate and wayward sniffing. It’s beeline stuff.
But I can pretty much always beat him at domestic hide-and-seek.
What fun is Tic-Tac-Toe if you always play to a stalemate.
I’ve decided that’s definitely Sam’s philosophy.
I will play hide-&-seek with current pooch. I could get over on her for a few seconds, as in she’d first look behind the door to the right but I was in the closet to the left. Now she has learned most of the hiding spots & looks towards them upon the room. Sometimes I can still get her though - if she goes the wrong way, I’ll yell out, “Yaaah” & smack her butt; she takes off running towards her bed. When I get there, I ‘yell’ at her that it’s not a base & when she doesn’t get up, I give her a good beating skritching; she loves it!
OBL, OTOH, was built from the back - he had tons of wag because he was always happy, & extra leg muscles because he loved to run, & a huge heart because he loved to give kisses. With all those extras the was no room left for the stuff up front. One of his nicknames was ‘DTS Doggy’, which stood for dumber than something & he had no nose. I don’t know if it was damaged from the beatings he got before The Asshole abandoned him but if you managed to get a toy out of sight it was gone; he’d look all over for it, & if I put a treat in the palm of one of my two fists he had slightly better than 50% chance of going for the correct hand
Most def! I have a pointer, and have had other pointers. These are dogs that people pay good money for their nose (often after expensive training). My pointers have sniffed out chukars sitting next to me that I didn’t see when I almost stepped on them (one sniffed them out from 20+ feet away). Yet I have always done hide and seek with them indoors and they ignore their superior nose skills for the sheer fun of finding me or their toy. They have neve sniffed me out when I know they could. They just love the game of finding me or their toy.
Dogs may have good sniffers, but most of them have the intelligence of small house plants. And I’m being generous here. So hiding something from them is not that hard.
Hiding something from a cat, however, is impossible. They will just sit down in front of you and give you stink eye, all the while communicating bad vibes telepathically until you finally get it for them and apologize for living, and taking up what is THEIR space they allow you to live in. For now.
I assume there will some variance depending on dog breed. I recall that one of the tests for measuring relative intelligence of different breeds was to hide something under a blanket and see how long it takes for the dog to find it. The “smarter” breeds could find it almost immediately. The Afghan never could figure out where it is.
I can see how things like motivation might play into the results, as well as some instinctive behaviors (breeds bred for burrowing might have an advantage).
Yes, I’ve wondered about this. The Hollywood trope is that hiding drugs is commonly done inside coffee shipments because the coffee smell overwhelms. Of course, in the movies, the existence of a big bag or drum of coffee is “oh! That’s where the drugs are…”
OTOH - an old acquaintance in college told the story of crossing back into Canada in the hippie days. They’d bought a substantial quantity of pot, and prudence suggested they not try to take it across the border - so they parked a few miles away and smoked the lot. He said when they go to Canada, they were hauled into the customs building, and the agent was telling them “You might as well tell us where the pot is, the dog is going to find it.” Out the window, they could see a dog in their car, going nuts and just wildly shaking his nose all over the place. Eventually, customs gave up and let them go.