If you come back home at the same time every day, your dog can anticipate when you’re about to walk through the door based on how much of your scent is still present. When you leave, your scent dissipates a bit. Dogs can use pattern recognition along with their senses to keep a schedule.įor instance, they can smell your scent when you’re home. This is a form of pattern recognition, and that can help dogs tell time fairly well, too. They may just think you have a general problem with urine or feces, but it would be hard for them to connect their actions with the consequence. If you scold them even a few seconds later, they probably don’t understand what’s wrong. For example, dogs understand when you reprimand them for going potty in the house, so long as you catch them in the act.
Dogs rely on this rhythm to tell them when to address their needs for food, sleep, and other necessary activities.ĭogs are also pretty good at creating associations between events, which is important for conditioning behavior. Most lifeforms on earth have circadian rhythms, which are natural biological clocks that are tied to the length of a day. There are many ways that dogs can tell time, as most animals can, that don’t depend on episodic memories. You may be able to set your watch by your dog’s ability to stay on schedule.ĭoes that mean dogs can construct timelines the way humans do with episodic memories?
They know each day, within minutes, when it’s time to wake up, go outside, eat, and so on. Most dog parents will tell you that their pups record day-to-day time very well. Humans, however, don’t just know the difference between a short time and a long time they differentiate time lengths more specifically and live their lives based on that ability to differentiate.īut what about dogs? Can they tell the difference between specific lengths of time? Do they react differently when we’ve been gone for a long time than when we’ve been away for a short time? How Do Dogs Experience Time? If they are gone for a long time, they return to places where they stored items that weren’t perishable, which suggests they know when they’ve been gone for a significant amount of time versus a short time. Some birds, for example, return to locations based on where they store supplies and what they have stored. We used to think that only humans experienced episodic memories, though research suggests otherwise. A minute feels different from an hour, which is different than a day, a week, a year, a decade, etc. We can create a timeline in our heads and place memories in order, and that gives us a pretty good sense of how much time has passed, whether it’s a short time or a long time. Humans have good episodic memories, meaning we can recall specific events, relate them to other events, and anticipate future events. It may be the way our memories work that separates our experience of time from that of other animals, including dogs, more than anything else.