Dogs know when they don't know

Researchers at the DogStudies lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have shown that dogs possess some "metacognitive" abilities -- specifically, they are aware of when they do not have enough information to solve a problem and will actively seek more information, similarly to primates. To investigate this, the researchers created a test in which dogs had to find a reward -- a toy or food -- behind one of two fences. They found that the dogs looked for additional information significantly more often when they had not seen where the reward was hidden.