Study shows dogs imitate selectively

Dog owners have long maintained that their pooches have a lot more going on between their furry ears than scientists acknowledge. Now, new research is adding to the growing evidence that man's best friend thinks a lot more than many humans have believed.

The provocative new experiment indicated that dogs can do something that previously only humans have been shown capable of doing: decide how to imitate a behavior based on the specific circumstances in which the action takes place.

"The fact that the dogs imitate selectively, depending on the situation — that has not been shown before," said Friederike Range, study leader from the University of Vienna. "That's something completely new."

The findings come amid a flurry of research that is revealing surprisingly complex abilities among animals long dismissed as having little intellectual or emotional life.

"Every day, we're discovering surprises about animals and finding out animals are far more intelligent and far more emotional than we previously thought," said Marc Bekoff, an animal behaviorist.

The dog study was inspired by research with human babies. Fourteen-month-olds will imitate an adult turning on a light with her forehead only if they see her doing it with her hands free. If the adult is clutching a blanket, babies will use their hands, presumably because they can reason that the adult resorted to using her forehead only because her hands were full.

To determine whether an animal could respond similarly, Range and her colleagues trained Guinness, a female border collie, to push a wooden rod with her paw to get a treat. A dog generally prefers to use its mouth to do tasks whenever possible. So the key question was whether dogs that watched Guinness would decide how to get the treat depending on the circumstances.

Researchers tested three groups of dogs. The first 14, representing a variety of breeds, did not watch Guinness. When taught how to use the rod, about 85 percent pushed it with their mouth, confirming that is how dogs naturally like to do things.

The second group of 21 dogs watched Guinness repeatedly push the rod with her paw while holding a ball in her mouth. In that group, most of the dogs — about 80 percent — used their mouth, imitating the action but not the exact method Guinness had used. That suggested the dogs — like the human babies — decided Guinness was using her paw only because she had no choice.

The third group of 19 dogs watched Guinness repeatedly use a paw on the rod with her mouth free. Most of those dogs — 83 percent — imitated her behavior exactly, using their paws and not their mouth. That suggested they concluded there must be some good reason to act against their instincts and do it like Guinness.

"The behavior was very similar to the children who were tested in the original experiment," said Zsofia Viranyi, of Eotvos University in Budapest, who helped conduct the experiment, published in the May 15 issue of the journal Current Biology. "Whether they imitate or not depends on the context. It's not automatic, insightless copying. It's more sophisticated. There's a kind of inferential process going on. "

Viranyi and her colleagues said more research is needed to confirm the results and explore what the findings say about the canine brain.

The findings stunned many researchers.

"What's surprising and shocking about this is that we thought this sort of imitation was very sophisticated, something seen only in humans," said Brian Hare, who studies dogs at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "Once again, it ends up dogs are smarter than scientists thought."