Study finds that dogs have a sharp memory that enables them to recall events from their past

It is said that a dog is a man's best friend.  

Many of us enjoy the companionship that dogs offer. But have you ever wondered what kind of memory our fury friends have?  

Well, according to researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, dogs have episodic-like memories.  

 Claudia Fugazza, a canine cognition researcher at the university told Inverse that “if you are able to ‘replay’ scenes of the past in your mind, then you must be aware that you were there." 

The researchers found that dogs can recall events from their past.   

In the study, the dogs were first taught to perform a small set of actions upon request. Then they were tested to determine how well they could repeat their own actions.  

The study found that dogs repeated their own actions after delays ranging from a few seconds to one hour.  

"Dogs were able to repeat their own actions, irrespectively of whether these were included in the ‘repeat training’ or not," the study found.  

"Moreover, dogs were also able to repeat their own actions in tests where the command to repeat was alternated with the command to imitate others’ actions and in trials in which they were asked to ‘stay’ (i.e., ‘do nothing’), thereby showing flexibility in generalizing the ‘repeat rule’ to different situations. Most importantly, dogs were able to repeat their own actions when the command to repeat was issued unexpectedly, in everyday-life contexts," found the study. 

However, even though dogs can recall past experiences, the memory may fade quickly.  

“Of course, memory decays. And episodic memory, in dogs, like in humans, decays faster than semantic memory,” Fugazza told Inverse.  

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