
Dogs Forget Events Two Minutes Later - Red_Tarsius
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/02/150226-dogs-memories-animals-chimpanzees-science-mind-psychology/
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anigbrowl
Mmm....seems a bit dubious. My dog likes me to hide his rubber ball so he can
go look for it, and he's so good at remembering places I've hidden it before
that finding new places to make him really _look_ for it is a problem (he's
not very scent-motivated). Now of course he could be relying on associative
memory because I praise him when he does a good 'find' but their test here
looks overly reductionist to me. For sure, if I'm doing something else for a
while and then ask him where his ball is, he may well have forgotten where he
left it and looks in random places. So his memory is not that great; on the
other hand, when I see that he has multiple balls (which he enjoys hoarding)
in one spot I'll call him to bring one over, then wait a bit before telling
him to go get another one, in which case he knows exactly where to go. I'll
try timing the interval to see how long before he forgets his previous
position.

The other thing that occurs to me is some dogs' habit of burying bones and so
on that they may want to store for later. Sure, they are using their sense of
smell there, which is many times better than ours, but given that dogs don't
have mediocre vision to start with (by comparison to ours), I wonder again
about the quality of the experimental design. If you asked people to remember
something using one of their inferior senses - say, a series of fabric
textures that are only touched rather than seen - I suspect they would turn in
mediocre results. It seems to me that the stimuli used in the experiment were
too abstract to be sufficiently engaging to the animals, for the same reason
that we don't have a very extensive tactile vocabulary, notwithstanding the
importance of touch as a sense.

~~~
dalke
I'll be generous and suggest that NatGeo didn't translate the research fully
correctly. The quote from the researcher is "animals have no long-term memory
of arbitrary events" though there may be "specialized memory systems hardwired
to remember certain "biologically relevant information" (such as where to find
food)."

This would mean that it's much harder to have a discussion abou the topic
without a detailed understanding of what "associative memory", etc. means -
knowledge I don't have.

