How smart is your lab? If they are based on social media, you’ll think they’re very smart. Apparently, at least sometimes, it’s the equivalent of a four-foot man in a fur coat. Recent research has seen many of the phenomena behind dogs’ higher mental abilities. Pavlov studied only simple reflexes.
Perhaps one breakthrough came into being in the 1990s when it comes to cognitive abilities in our dogs. At the time, I was reading many books about my own ability to handle things with my dog and socially respond to other environmental factors. One of the tests seemed easy. If the dog could pass the test, he demonstrated its mental abilities. The scores are based on human age and cognitive abilities, and researchers concluded that most dogs have cognitive abilities to truly mimic the age of human children, especially young children. They can learn about 200 words, an astonishing. They can understand gestures and read body language like FBI agents. They can learn and even understand several languages!!!!!
Fun facts: Based on careful and controlled research, it is perhaps the most linguistically talented dog ever in the “Chaser” of the border collie, owned by a retired psychologist. The Chaser had a vocabulary of about 1,000 words, comparable to what would be expected of a human child between 3 and 4 years old. He even recognized the word “ball,” but also recognized the various sizes and textures.
