Ever wondered how your pet dog knows exactly where food is hidden? Our canine companions can adopt human perspective to…
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Ever wondered how your pet dog knows exactly where food is hidden? Our canine companions can adopt human perspective to correctly interpretcues and find treats that they cannot see themselves, a new study has found.
By adopting the position of a human and following their gaze, dogs understand what the human could see and consequently know, researchers said.
The Theory of Mind describes the ability inhumans to understand mental states in other humans such as emotions, intentions, knowledge, beliefs and desires, said researchers from Messerli Research Institute in Austria.
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This ability develops in humans within the first four or five years of life while it is usually denied in animals, researchers said.
Researchers conducted the Guesser-Knower paradigm – a standard test in research into the attribution of knowledge to others.
This experiment involves two persons, a "Knower" who hides food, invisibly for the dog, in one of several food containers or knows where somebody else has hidden it, and a "Guesser".
The Guesser has either not been in the room or covered her eyes during the hiding of the food.
A non-transparent wall blocks the animals' view of the food being hidden. After that, the two humans become informants by pointing to different food containers.
The Knower always points to the baited container and the Guesser to another one. All containers smell of food.
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