TORONTO – A new study suggests that, just like humans, dogs are self-aware and likely understand the consequences of their actions.
The findings, published in the Scientific Reports journal on Thursday, say dogs are capable of displaying ‘body awareness’, a manifestation of self-representation.
Self-representation is a concept that describes how you view yourself and the image you hold in mind of yourself – a construction of your own identity.
Part of that concept is “body awareness” or physical “self-awareness” – a recognition of how your body physically relates to a space. The study said babies from five months of age can spot their moving legs as an example on video.
“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 one of the fundamental building blocks of self-representation,” the study says .
And while it is widely believed that most species have a basic sense of self-perception, “body awareness” is a trait that is clearly applied to humans, and scientists have been trying to find out if animals have it.
Dogs have an extensive “well-proven account of complex cognitive skills,” such as empathy and social learning, making them an ideal research topic, the study said.
The scientists tested 54 dogs by placing them on a mat and instructing them to pick up an object and give it to their owner. The articles were attached either to the mat or to the ground under the mat under the test conditions.
In the first test, researchers attached a ball to the mat and asked the dog to give the ball to their owner. Since the ball was tied to the mat, the dog wouldn’t be able to bring the ball to the owner unless they got off the mat first.
Many of the dogs realized the problem and stepped off the mat to complete the task – they showed a sense of “ body awareness, ” the study said.
In the second test, researchers attached the ball to the floor under the mat and gave the dog commands 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 tied to the ground, the dogs left the mat less often, which the study suggests that dogs do recognize when their body is or is not an impediment to the command they were given.
The researchers say the dogs “showed the first convincing evidence of body awareness by understanding the consequences of one’s own actions in a species where no higher order self-representation capacity was previously found.”
Researchers said the study also showed that dogs would be able to register their own action and its consequences – and separate them from other external stimuli.
Researchers believe their findings will help them test for “body awareness” in other animal species.