@Newton: I never thought that my dog ​​could also discover anti-physical phenomena!

Written by: Zhu Hengheng

Editor: Wang Haha

Layout: Li Xuewei

Compared to the aloof and independent cats, gentle and sensible dogs are closer to and more dependent on humans, so they are deeply loved by people. At the same time, in daily life, because dogs are very happy to communicate with people, people can easily train them. Therefore, in daily life, people generally believe that dogs are very smart animals.

However, some people believe that intelligence is a relative concept, and that people think dogs are smart because they are more human than other animals and can understand human emotions. From an intelligence perspective, dogs are not necessarily smart, after all, their brain capacity is not as high as that of pigs.

Previously, researchers from the University of Vienna found that although dogs' brain capacity is not large, they are still very smart.

Through experiments, researchers have confirmed for the first time that dogs can clearly understand the physical laws of the objective world and have basic ability to distinguish cause and effect. It is reported that this phenomenon has only been observed in infants and adult chimpanzees before, and adult chimpanzees are considered to be one of the smartest animals on earth.

In this regard, Christoph Völter, a doctor of veterinary medicine at the University of Vienna and the corresponding author of this study, said, "This study does not mean that dogs really understand the physical laws of the objective world. This study reflects an intuition, just like having expectations about the objective environment. Once the environment shows a conflict with the laws of physics, the dog's expectations will be broken."

The related research, titled "Dogs' looking times and pupil dilation response reveal expectations about contact causality", was published in the journal Biology Letters.

Dog, man's faithful friend

Since humans living in Eurasia first successfully domesticated wolves into dogs 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, dogs have long become humans' good friends and have played an important role in human production and life.

First, they acted as hunting dogs. Although they became dogs, they still had the talent of wolves. They could run at a steady speed of 35 km/h and could reach a maximum speed of 70 km/h when attacking, which was almost the same as that of lions. At the same time, the bite force of dogs was as high as 700 IBS, which was even slightly higher than the 691 IBS of cougars. Therefore, dogs were good helpers for humans in hunting for a long time.

Since then, after training, dogs have the ability to manage other animals. For example, sheepdogs can drive sheep by running, and Corgis can drive cattle by biting their heels or even jumping between the backs of cattle.

In addition, with the development of society, the work of dogs has been further subdivided . For example, there are Chinese pastoral dogs that guard homes, and various working dogs with professional skills, including police dogs, military dogs, fire dogs, ambulance dogs, disaster relief dogs, guide dogs, and pet dogs, etc. These dogs with different divisions of labor have provided great help to human life.

(Source: Pixabay)

In recent years, with the advancement of science, human research on dogs has become more in-depth, and more and more studies have found that dogs are smarter than humans imagined.

For example, as early as 2004, a study published in the American journal Science showed that a border collie named "Rico" in Leipzig, Germany could understand 200 words and accurately execute verbal commands.

At the same time, researchers have previously conducted experiments on hundreds of dogs and found that although dogs can be trained to follow the advice of strangers, they still retain their ability to identify themselves. When the experimenter lies to the dog, or the dog judges that the experimenter's advice is not of reference value, the dog will choose to ignore the human's advice. In other words, dogs can recognize human lies.
Not only that, a research team at Etvos Lorand University that specializes in canine cognition recently found that although dogs cannot directly understand human language, they can understand the meaning of human language by sensing human tone and pauses when speaking. It is reported that this ability has only been confirmed in human infants before, and has not yet been found in human mammals.

Dogs can actually recognize the laws of physics

Although dogs are smart, they are not humans after all. Humans can understand the environment and physical laws through cause and effect at a very young age, for example, a toy in your hand will fall to the ground no matter how you throw it. Previously, people only found the same phenomenon in primates such as chimpanzees, and knew little about non-primates.

In order to understand whether dogs, human beings' best friends, are also so smart and have the same ability, researchers at the University of Vienna adapted the eye tracking system used in human infant research to work with dogs. At the same time, the researchers trained the dogs to watch 3D animations, some of which obeyed Newton's laws of motion and some did not. While the dogs watched the animations, the researchers recorded the dogs' reactions.

(Source: Pixabay)

The animations mainly involved balls bouncing in different ways, including with or without the application of external forces. The researchers found that when the ball's movement violated the laws of physics, the dogs were visibly surprised and their pupils became significantly larger.

Specifically, during the experiment, the researchers trained 14 adult border collies to watch animations on an eye-tracking device. These animations were played in a random order, and some of them showed a moving ball hitting a stationary ball, and after the collision, the first ball stopped the movement of the other ball. Another animation showed that when a ball did not hit the stationary ball, it started to roll on its own, which was obviously illogical.

Figure | Dogs can notice that animations violate the laws of physics (Source: Biology Letters)

The team found that when watching the video, the dog's reaction was very similar to that of the chimpanzee, with its eyes fixed on the illogically moving ball and its pupils dilated to show "incredibility." This means that the dog seems to understand that this movement does not conform to the laws of the physical world.
Regarding this phenomenon, researchers believe that dogs have intuitive expectations of physical laws. In other words, in the eyes of dogs, the first video shows that the ball moves after being hit, which is consistent with their experience. When the second video appears, the ball moves in a way that is beyond their understanding, so they are shocked and expect humans to give them a reasonable explanation.

This discovery is undoubtedly surprising. After all, dogs are always low-level animals to humans, and the phenomenon that the ball can only move after impact, which is the ability to understand the physical environment through cause and effect, has always been considered unique to humans and some primates.

In general, it has been tens of thousands of years since dogs were domesticated by humans, during which time humans and dogs have closely cooperated and depended on each other. The results of this study show that as good friends of humans, dogs are not only smart because they are close to humans, but they are actually very smart and have a certain understanding of the physical laws and cause-and-effect relationships of the objective world.

References:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0465#RSBL20210465F1

https://phys.org/news/2021-12-dogs-animations-violate-laws-physics.html#google_vignette