Deferred imitation of novel and known actions in domestic dogs.

Two independent studies used the “do as I do” procedure to demonstrate the dogs’ ability to functionally match their behaviour to an action demonstrated by an experimenter. In the present study, we investigated the dogs’ ability to encode and recall the demonstration after a delay relying on its memory (‘deferred imitation’). These results suggest that dogs are able to recall and reproduce an action after a delay and to imitate novel actions without previously practicing them. These findings suggest, for the first time, evidence of deferred imitation in dogs. This implies that facilitative processes cannot exhaustively explain the observed behavioural similarity and that dogs’ imitative abilities may be rather based on an enduring representation of the demonstration.