Do dogs have a memory and how good is it?

Dogs are incredibly intelligent animals that perfectly know the owner, the household and even recognize their favorite brand of food. But scientists could not determine whether they remembered past events. Now they have answered this question, however, everything turned out to be not so simple for dogs with memory.

To answer the question of whether your Rex or Boyfriend remembers what happened before, you first need to understand the principles of memory. Semantic memory is long-term knowledge acquired as a result of conscious study. This is, for example, arithmetic, foreign languages or spelling. Over time, such information has no connection.

In dogs, this type of memory is very well developed. They remember the owner by appearance, smell and voice, distinguish favorite toys, food and a place of rest. But do these animals have episodic memory, that is, associated with specific events from the past?

A person has memories associated with a certain place and time, mostly episodic. It's a dish you liked once, or the color of a car you rented during your vacation. It is very difficult to identify such episodic memories in dogs. Claudia Fugazza from the University of Budapest, who studies the cognitive abilities of dogs, says this about it:

The scientist believes that it is not important whether the owner's face or some event is preserved in the animal's memory. A big role is played by how it is encoded in each case. Fugazza is sure that people doubted the dog's memory because they associated it with self-awareness.

Scientists have been arguing for centuries about whether self-awareness is inherent in animals. For a long time it was believed that this is a feature inherent only to man. But in 2021, we managed to prove that we are not alone and dogs have it too. In 2016, Fugazza and her team investigated the episodic memory of dogs. They were looking for evidence of whether animals remember past human actions.

Dogs had to memorize certain human actions. The memory was checked a minute and an hour after it was committed. It turns out that dogs can recall actions in both cases. This means that they still have episodic memory. In 2021, the experiment was complicated, but it again proved that dogs remember past events and themselves in them.

So before you yell at your pet for no reason, think carefully. Perhaps you will offend your devoted friend for a long time and spoil his mood. Earlier we wrote about whether dogs can distinguish colors.