New Research on Dogs' Long-Term Memory Is Downright Fascinating

New research into dogs' long-term memory shows that dogs can remember the names of toys even years after not seeing or playing with them.

On September 4, 2024, new research was published in Biology Letters that examined dogs' long-term memory and just how good it is. Here's what we know.

In the journal Biology Letters , Shany Dror of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and their research team discovered just how far back a dog's long-term memory goes.

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In the research, the team wanted to learn more about a dog's ability to remember. To do this, they studied five dogs who had previously learned the names of 12 toys. The toys were then put away for two years so the dogs didn't have access to them.

Then, two years later, the dog parents brought all those toys back into the rotation. " Three dogs had all 12, another had 11 toys, and one dog had only five toys as some had been misplaced," The Guardian explained.

The research team then wanted to test if the dogs could still recall the names of those toys years later, and the results were fascinating.

The dog parents were asked to show their dog the toys before placing the test toys in one room of their house alongside the other toys they've played with more recently.

The parents then went into a different room while the dogs stayed in the room with the toys. The parents asked their dog to bring a toy to them by the name they had learned years ago. The research team watched how the dogs reacted to each prompt via online video recording.

Some Dogs Have a Good Long-Term Memory

"The results reveal that, overall, the dogs picked the correct toy 44% of the time on average – with some having a success rate of up to 60%," The Guardian explained.

Four of the dogs were able to retrieve three to nine of the reintroduced toys successfully. "These figures, the researchers add, are far above the level expected by chance," the publication explained.

“Little is known about the long-term memory capacities of the domestic dog,” the researchers explained . “Our findings expand our knowledge of this topic by showing that some individual dogs can maintain object-label mappings years after they have first been exposed to them.”

“However, from the fact that this capacity is within the species’ cognitive abilities, we cannot infer that it is a common characteristic,” the research team added. “As the majority of family dogs do not show behavioral evidence of learning object labels, the findings presented here cannot be generalized to other dog populations or other cognitive domains.”