Some Dogs Can Remember Names of Their Toys — Years After Not Seeing Them, New Study Suggests
“These dogs provide a unique opportunity to study label retention in a non-linguistic species,” researchers said
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A dog playing with a toy (stock image)Your dog's memory might be better than you think.
A study published in Biology Letters on Wednesday, Sept. 4, suggests that some dogs can remember the names of their toys years after not seeing them.
Researchers tested five dogs — named Max, Rico, Squall, Whisky and Gaia — and noted in the journal that “these dogs provide a unique opportunity to study label retention in a non-linguistic species.”
In December 2020, each of the dogs’ owners taught each dog the names of 12 toys in one week before taking the toys away from them.
“The owners were asked to store the toys out of the dogs’ reach for two years,” the researchers explained. Two years later, in February 2023, the owners quietly reintroduced the toys to their pets.
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A dog playing with a toy (stock image)Related: Meet the ‘Chief Dog Officer’ on Royal Caribbean’s New Ship — a Puppy Named Rover
“To make sure that during the test the dogs did not get overexcited due to the presence of the reintroduced toys, one day before the test the owners were instructed to leave the toys on the floor and allow the dogs to inspect those for [1 hour],” the researchers wrote, adding that the owners were also instructed to not engage with the dogs during this hour.
On test day, the dogs gained access to their old toys for 30 minutes before researchers began their two-year retention test.
To test the dogs this time, the owners put six of their old toys in another room with six other unknown test toys. The owners then asked their dogs to retrieve each of their old toys, using the names they learned two years ago.
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A dog playing with a toy (stock image)The test results revealed that the five dogs made 44% correct choices while attempting to retrieve their old toys from memory, which was higher than the average chance level of 20.4%.
The researchers said more tests need to be completed on more dogs over time to fully understand general retention rates of dogs.
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“Little is known about the long-term memory capacities of the domestic dog,” the researchers concluded. “Our findings expand our knowledge of this topic by showing that some individual dogs can maintain object-label mappings years after they have first been exposed to them.”
“However, from the fact that this capacity is within the species’ cognitive abilities, we cannot infer that it is a common characteristic,” they added. “As the majority of family dogs do not show behavioral evidence of learning object labels, the findings presented here cannot be generalized to other dog populations or other cognitive domains.”
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