Many owners seriously believe that dogs, like the fish Dory from the famous cartoon, remember everything for only three seconds, and then their memory, so to speak, “self-cleanses”. In response to the question of where such information comes from, experts most often shrug their shoulders: well, we heard somewhere. It does not even occur to them that if this were true, dogs would by definition be incapable of learning anything - and would not be able to remember anyone, including members of their family.
Dogs remember. Of course, their memory does not work the same way as human memory, but I assure you, its resources are more than enough to recognize people even after a very long separation. Potentially, a dog is able to remember “its” person all its life: on the Internet you can find many stories about the happy reunion of the owner and his pet after years. Most of them, I am sure, are pure truth.
Dogs Remember Everything Differently
How exactly canine memory works is a major mystery. As far as scientists have been able to determine, the main difference between humans and dogs is the type of memory used for long-term storage of personal information. More precisely, we widely use episodic memory for this, while dogs use associative memory.
Dogs create strong connections between various sensations and the people around them. Photo by Szabolcs Molnar/Pixabay
Episodic memory stores most of the contextually related details of events that happen to us, including time, place, “participants,” and the emotions we experience at the time. Memories are stored with us throughout our lives, and we can, with a strong desire (or, say, under hypnosis), restore them in our imagination down to the smallest detail.
In the context of our relationship with a dog, this looks like this. Whether we like it or not, we remember not only the name of the kennel where we got our puppy, and the date when we first saw it, but also the shape of the knot on the colored thread with which the breeder marked it, and even what toy the baby was holding in his teeth when he ran out to meet us.
Dogs are also capable of using episodic memory. However, as studies show, canine capabilities in this regard are much more modest than human ones. Dogs mostly use associative memory: thanks to well-developed senses, among which the sense of smell occupies a special place, they create strong connections between various sensations and the people around them.
In a dog's memory, any individual person is a unique puzzle of many smells, sounds and sensations. Each piece of this puzzle evokes feelings in the dog, pleasant or unpleasant, and depending on how the person treats the dog in general, the dog will associate it with love and safety or pain and fear.
All this together forms their memories. In other words, your dog cannot remember in detail, for example, the day when he met you, but he remembers perfectly the feelings associated with you - love, happiness, safety or, conversely, anxiety. In a sense, we can say that the dog remembers not the place where you were with him, but the emotions that your time together caused in him.