clipped from: www.sciencedaily.com   

Dogs Can Classify Complex Photos In Categories Like Humans Do


In the first test, the dogs were shown completely different dog and landscape pictures.  They continued to reliably select the dog photographs, demonstrating that they could transfer their knowledge gained in the training phase to a new set of visual stimuli, even though they had never seen those particular pictures before.


In the second test, the dogs were shown new dog pictures pasted onto the landscape pictures used in the training phase, facing them with contradictory information: on the one hand, a new positive stimulus as the pictures contained dogs even though they were new dogs; on the other hand, a familiar negative stimulus in the form of the landscape.


When the dogs were faced with a choice between the new dog on the familiar landscape and a completely new landscape with no dog, they reliably selected the option with the dog.  These results show that the dogs were able to form a concept i.e. ‘dog’,