TORONTO – A new study suggests that dogs, like humans, are self-conscious and likely understand the consequences of their actions.
The findings, published Thursday in the Scientific Reports journal, say dogs are capable of showing “body awareness,” a manifestation of self-representation.
Self-representation is a concept that describes how you view yourself, and the image you hold in your mind of yourself – a construction of your own identity.
Part of the concept is ‘body awareness’ or physical ‘self-awareness’ – an acknowledgment of how your body is physically related to a space. The study said that babies up to five months old can recognize their moving legs on video as an example.
“Body awareness, ‘the ability to keep information about one’s own body in mind as an explicit object, in relation to other objects in the world’, can be considered as one of the fundamental building blocks of self-representation, ‘” the study said.
And while it is generally accepted that most species possess a basic sense of self-perception, ‘body awareness’ is a trait that is clearly applied to humans, and scientists have tried to find out if animals possess it as well.
Dogs have an extensive ‘proven record of complex cognitive abilities’, such as empathy and social learning, which makes them an ideal research subject, the study says.
The scientists tested 54 dogs by placing them on a small mat and giving them orders to pick up their owner and give object. The objects were attached to the mat or the ground under the mat in 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 is attached to the mat, the dog would not be able to bring the ball to its owner unless he first got off the mat.
Many of the dogs realized the problem and got off the mat to complete the task – with the feeling that they were ‘body conscious’, the study says.
In the second test, researchers attached the ball to the ground under the mat and instructed the dog to give the ball to their owner. This was to test whether the dogs understood the difference between “there is an obstacle” versus their “body is the obstacle.”
When the ball was attached to the ground, the dogs left the mat less frequently, which the study shows that dogs do recognize when their body is an obstacle to the command they have been given.
According to the researchers, the dogs “showed the first convincing evidence of body awareness through the understanding of the consequence of self-action in a species where previously no ability of a higher order for self-representation was found.”
According to researchers, the study also showed that dogs can register their own actions and their consequences – and separate them from other external stimuli.
Researchers believe that their findings will help them test for ‘body awareness’ in other animal species moving forward.