"How Good Is a Dog's Ability to Remember People?" Response

As a dog-owner, I often wonder what my dog is thinking when they do certain things. An article published a few days ago from Psychology Today reinforced my curiosities, as they released an interesting article on the ability of dogs in remembering people.

Living overseas from my home in Australia has meant that we go back to visit our friends and family every year for about a month, and without a doubt, whenever we come home to my dog, Charlie, he is ecstatic. Although a month is not exactly a long time period, I'm sure many of you have seen the emotional YouTube videos on soldiers coming home from years of service to their dogs. The videos never fail to make me cry, whether that's because of the joyful emotion of the dogs and their owners, or knowing the distance that they have been separated.

This article reminded me of these videos, as the author of this article was explaining a question he got from one of his psychology students who was going to be away from her dog for 22 months and wanted to know if the dog would recognise her when she returned.

The author, Stanley Coren notes, there is not much empirical data that has been done. Ethically, this is because it is extremely difficult for owners and dogs to be separated just for the sake of an experiment, and it is hard to mirror the situation in a lab setting. Coren states that instead, psychologists have had to result to anecdotes and descriptive data instead.

As a psychology student, I think this topic is extremely fascinating and should perhaps be studied further in the future. Although there are various ethical considerations, I think learning the cognition of dogs and other pet species in terms of their relationship with their owners would be really interesting. Hopefully in the future, more research into dogs and other household animals are studied without the ethical issues associated.

The full article can be read at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201707/how-good-is-dogs-ability-remember-people