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Science Sphere Researchers have discovered that dogs form “multi-modal mental images” of familiar objects, meaning they visualize multiple sensory aspects—like sight and smell—when thinking about them. The study focused on how dogs recognize toys, revealing that dogs don’t just rely on one sense but integrate various sensory information to identify objects.The researchers trained 3 “Gifted Word Learner” dogs (which can learn toy names) and 10 typical family dogs to fetch a specific toy among distractors, both in light and darkness. All dogs succeeded, but it took longer in the dark. The gifted dogs were also tested to understand what they imagine when hearing a toy’s name. Results showed that dogs recall a toy’s sensory features to recognize it, even without visual cues.Interestingly, dogs mainly rely on vision but use their noses more in the dark—sniffing increased by 90%, though it accounted for only 20% of the search time. This suggests dogs primarily use sight but supplement it with smell when necessary.The study highlights dogs’ complex cognitive abilities to form rich mental representations of objects, combining multiple senses.RESEARCH PAPER 📄Shany Dror et al, “Multisensory mental representation of objects in typical and Gifted Word Learner dogs.” Animal Cognition (2022)