New Trick To Teach Your Pooch In The Holidays

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This is something new that most dogs are not trained for but now we know how with this following article. So rest assured that this Christmas vacation photos can be sorted by your dog.

Dogs can sort photographs into categories in the same way that humans and other primates do, the British weekly-New Scientist reports. Friederike Range at the University of Vienna and colleagues trained four canines to distinguish photographs that featured dogs from photographs that did not, it says.

At first, the pooches were simultaneously shown photographs of a landscape and of a dog, and were rewarded if they selected the latter, using a paw operated computed touch screen. After attaining a good level of computer savviness, the dogs were then shown an unfamiliar landscape and dog photos. They continued to correctly identify the pictures of the dog. In the final phase of the experiment, the dogs were shown an unfamiliar dog that was  superimposed on a landscape that has been used in the training phase.

The animals were still able to pick out the dog in preferance to an image of just a landscape. Range told New Scientist that this is proof that dogs have reasoning abilities. "We know they can categorise "food" or "enemies" from experience," she said. "But this is the first time we have taught them an abstract concept - a dog- and shown they can transfer this knowledge to a new situation." The study is published in a specialist journal, Animal Cognition.

Source: AFP, Paris.