Dogs 'mimic movements of owners'

[Treffie]

Dogs "automatically imitate" the body movements of their owners, according to a study.

This automatic imitation is a crucial part of social learning in humans.

But Austrian researchers report that the phenomenon - where the sight of another's body movement causes the observer to move in the same way - is evident in many other animals.

They say that it reveals clues about how this type of learning evolved.

The study, which was led by Dr Friederike Range from the University of Vienna in Austria, also suggests that the way in which people interact with and play with their dogs as they are growing up shapes their ability to imitate.

"It's not a spontaneous thing," said Dr Range. "The dogs needed a lot of training to learn it."

She and her colleagues investigated this imitation with a series of trials using a simple door-opening test.

The team built a box with a sliding door on the front that could be opened with a knob.

The owners demonstrated how to open the door by using either their hand or their mouth.

"When the owners used the hand, the dog had to open the door with its paw to get a reward," Dr Range said.

When the owner opened the door with their mouth, the dog had to use the same technique.

Dr Range explained to BBC News: "A second group of dogs had to learn the alternative method - if the owner used their hand, they had to use their mouth, and when the owner used their mouth, they had to use the paw."

'Mirror neurons'

The dogs that had to imitate the same action as their owner learned their task far more quickly.

This showed that the dogs had a predisposition to imitate their owners' hand/paw and mouth/muzzle movements.

She noted that, because dogs have a very different body shapes to people, they also had to interpret what they saw.

"This type of learning has obvious evolutionary advantages for animals," Dr Range said. "They can learn about certain aspects of life without having to learn by trial and error, which always comes with some risk."

The new evidence supports a theory of learning which suggests that a system of "mirror neurons" and the capacity to imitate are forged as an animal learns and develops, rather than this system being inborn.

Source (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10777586)

[Wölfin]

When my first dog (whom we bought as a puppy) wants out, she gets on her hind legs and puts her front paws around the doorknob and looks back at us. She knows the knob is what opens the door.

[Osweo]

I wink at mine, and she winks back! :p

[Cato]

Animals that are smart and social can pick up on motion or whatnot, intended or not, from their owners. My two idiot parakeets will often chirp and twitter at me for no other reason than for being in the same room with them (as a way to grab attention; they love it when I come home from work and will whoop it up after having been quiet all day). The male, the blue one I call Stupid because of his idiotic behavior (his constant head bobbing, pecking at a mirror, trying to hump a plastic parakeet toy and so forth :D), actually seems to be able to preempt me when I make a [bad] parakeet vocalization (i.e. whistle); he's whistled, in the same manner, before the whistle has even escaped my lips.

I'm amazed at how animals are often able to read body language and intent.

[Aemma]

My goggie will come to me if he wants something from the cupboard (his denta-stix or special nylabones). I might be sitting in the living room and then he'll sit on the floor right in front of me and stare at me. To get my attention he'll do a low rumbling vocalisation. I'll look up and say "Show me". So he starts trotting to the kitchen all the while looking back or next to him to make sure I'm following. :) He's so funny!

He also knows what "upstairs" means. If I say this word he'll walk to the bottom of the stairs and sit and wait while looking up the stairs.

On some days, I think I should have named him Einstein.

Dogs are incredibly intuitive and intelligent animals. It's freaky.

[SwordoftheVistula]

Normally we wouldn't open the door every 5 minutes for our cat, especially in winter, when he would just look outside for a moment (letting in a big gust of cold air) and then decide to stay inside. The same cat would also lie directly in front of the kerosene heater for so long that he would cook the insides of his stomach or something and make himself vomit, and as soon as we heard him making gagging noises we would quickly usher him outside in order to avoid having to clean cat vomit out of the carpet.

So, he started to fake vomiting noises in an attempt to be let outside.