TagALLY

Simply Amazing Dogs are fairly intelligent, they learn rapidly and it is not too difficult to train them, but a new Austrian research published online in Animal Cognition has really come up with a surprise: dogs seem to be able to form abstract concepts. We do not dare to attribute this even to apes, but the team led by Friederike Range from the University of Vienna in Austria has revealed for the first time that dogs can assign complex color images into categories exactly the way we do. The pooches proved it by using computer automated touch-screens, so that the potential human factors were totally removed. To check if dogs can visually classify images and apply this to new situations, 4 dogs were presented landscape and dog pictures. During the training phase, the animals saw both the landscape and dog images simultaneously and received a food pellet each time they chose the dog image (positive stimulus in conditioned learning). After the training period,... http://www.upcomingtechs.com/2007/11/d...