It’s impossible to look at dogs with their soulful eyes and not wonder what they’re thinking. Is it all squirrels and squeaky toys? Or do dogs reflect on themselves and their own thoughts and feelings? In other words, do they have self-awareness?
Although self-awareness is a key part of being human, it’s not known if dogs share this ability with us. After all, it’s pretty complex. Recent research, however, supports the idea that dogs have elements of self-awareness. In other words, their thinking is more complex than you’d expect!
Different ‘Modules’ of Self-Awareness
Dr. Péter Pongrácz is an associate professor in the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University. He and his graduate student, Petra Dobos, do experiments on dog self-representation. This means considering yourself when making a decision. A good example of this would be like whether you’re too big to fit through an opening.
Biologists can test this through experiments, but self-awareness is harder to test directly when the subject (the dogs) can’t speak. Humans, Dr. Pongrácz says, can talk about themselves, what they feel, and how they relate to the past and future after they’re a certain age. “In humans, self-awareness is much easier to test than animals,” he says.
Dr. Pongrácz and Dobos are using a new way of looking at self-awareness in animals — a framework of modules. These modules include different cognitive abilities:
- Theory of the mind, which refers to understanding that others have mental states different from your own
- Body awareness
- Episodic memory, which is remembering details of specific past events
- Self-representation, which is considering yourself when making a decision, through vision, scent, or sound
All of these modules together create self-awareness.
Do Dogs Have All the Modules of Self-Awareness?
Whether or not an animal has these modules depends on how necessary it is to survive. If there is no need for the theory of mind, for example, an animal wouldn’t evolve with that ability over generations. Dr. Pongrácz uses the social intelligence of dogs and cats as example. Dogs meet more social partners than cats, and have to cope with many different social situations. They may go to dog parks, dog shows, or other dog sports events, whereas cats are less likely.
“Dogs are very intelligent animals,” says Dr. Pongrácz. “They can handle all of these social challenges. That intelligence means more than [being] smart — I think cats are also very smart. But cats, for example, are much less flexible in their social intelligence. Dogs are incredibly flexible in their social mind, and I think flexibility and intelligence can be connected to a very developed self-representation.”
So dogs have more social intelligence than cats. But do they have all of the modules of self-awareness? Dr. Pongrácz expects they could. Since dogs live in a complex human environment full of ever-changing physical and social stimuli, this may have made having multiple of these modules an advantage to them. But not all the modules have been tested yet — and not all the ones that have been tested have shown positive results.
The Mirror Test vs. the Urine Sniffing Test
When scientists began to consider self-awareness in animals, the first, classic test was self-recognition in the mirror. The mirror test involves marking an animal with a bit of paint in a location that they can only see in the mirror. But the animal can’t realize that you put the paint there.
Next, the animal is put with a mirror. Scientists noted whether the animal touched the paint mark on their body when they saw it in the mirror. Animals that did this successfully include chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants. These animals are considered as a result to have self-recognition, the first step to self-awareness. But anybody who has seen a puppy encounter a mirror for the first time won’t be surprised to learn that dogs don’t pass this test.
But maybe mirror self-recognition isn’t an ecologically valid test for dogs. After all, they experience the world through scent more than vision. In that spirit, Dr. Roberto Cazzolla Gatti proposed an odor version of the mirror test. Later, Dr. Alexandra Horowitz used Dr. Gatti’s sniff test for her own olfactory mirror experiment, showing dogs canisters of urine. Sometimes the canisters contained the dog’s own urine, sometimes an unfamiliar dog’s urine, and sometimes the dog’s own urine with an added scent (as an equivalent to the mark in the mirror test). The dogs spent more time sniffing the unfamiliar dog’s urine than their own unmodified urine, but more interestingly, they spent more time sniffing their own modified urine than their unmodified urine. These results support the concept of self-recognition.
Do Dogs Recognize Their Own Breed?
Dr. Pongrácz praises the ecological validity of the olfactory mirror experiment. However, he wonders if the results might have reflected which odors were most unusual and therefore interesting for the dogs. And Dobos says it’s important to note that in the odor test, there is something for the dogs to actually interact with. “In the mirror test, dogs can see a transparency of their own image. It’s not a real feature of the environment. While in this experiment, they had the odors which were physically there.”
Still, despite dogs failing to recognize themselves in a mirror, both Dr. Pongrácz and Dobos think visual self-recognition may be biologically relevant for dogs. After all, different dog breeds look incredibly distinct, and there are many anecdotal reports of dogs responding differently to certain breeds.
According to Dr. Pongrácz, “Particular dog breeds may have some kind of imagination about how their breed should look, and we are planning experiments where we would test whether let’s say Border Collies know how Border Collies should look and whether it is connected to their own self-image.”
Body Awareness as an Element of Self-Awareness
Currently, Dr. Pongrácz and Dobos are most interested in dogs’ abilities in the body awareness module. Dobos explains that this particular module makes sense for dogs who need to know if they can fit in a hole or under a barrier, for example. “Dogs live in a complex environment with us, and their common ancestor with wolves lived in a very dense environment and had to move fast when hunting animals. So it’s a biologically relevant capacity.”
In an earlier body-as-obstacle study conducted by Dr. Pongrácz and his colleagues, dogs had to pick up an object and give it to their owner while standing on a mat. Sometimes the object was connected to the ground, but other times it was connected to the mat. When the object was attached to the mat, dogs came off the mat faster and more often showing they understood their own body was an obstacle to delivering the object.
Now, Dr. Pongrácz and Dobos are looking at how dogs navigate to a reward either by making a detour around a transparent barrier or through an opening in that barrier. At times the opening is too small for the dog to pass through comfortably, and at other times, it’s large enough. One shortcut study found that dogs used their own body awareness to decide whether to use the opening or take a detour around the barrier.
Their latest study of mixed-breed dogs examined whether dogs solve the barrier problem using body awareness or observational learning (watching an experimenter lead them around the barrier). They found that the dogs again used their sense of their own size when making decisions about the barrier openings. Only those dogs who were most keenly interested in the demonstrator’s behavior were more likely to detour around the barrier, even if the large opening was available to them.
Why Does Self-Awareness in Dogs Matter?
So far, it looks like your dog is more self-aware than you might have imagined, and these biologically relevant studies are only just beginning. But why does that matter? Dobos believes that every piece of information we get about dogs’ self-representation gives us a better picture of how they think. And that could influence us as a society. “Maybe we can reinforce more positive interactions, even for those people that still treat their dogs as objects, and maybe people can also understand that dogs are very complex, feeling animals. From the point of view of legislation, maybe we can make stricter laws on how animals are handled and what is not acceptable for keeping a dog.”
Dr. Pongrácz agrees, saying we need to understand that if dogs are this smart, then they are capable of suffering. He hopes that eventually, people will appreciate that when a dog has either health or behavioral problems, it’s a welfare issue for the dog. For example, “When a dog is left at home for half a day, and it has separation behavior problems, it’s not only a problem because my neighbor is upset by the dog barking all the time. But this very complex, very complicated-minded animal is suffering, and this is not a good thing.”