OK, what if your pup's cute head tilt that you've never seen before, happened while your phone was out of reach? Now you want a picture. But how do you get your pet to repeat an action it hasn't been trained to perform?

For K9s taught to "think back" on cue, you just have to ask. Turns out, dogs are capable of learning the instruction "do that again," and can flexibly access memories of their own recent actions — cognitive abilities they were not known to possess, according to the results of a recent University at Buffalo study.

"We found that dogs could be trained to repeat specific actions on cue, and then take what they'd learned and apply it to actions they had never been asked to repeat," the study's corresponding author, Allison Scagel, Ph.D., who was a UB graduate student in the Department of Psychology at the time of the research, said.

"Our findings showed that they were able to apply the concept of repetition to new situations. More generally, we found evidence that dogs are capable of forming abstract concepts."

Historically, there has been a notion that conscious awareness of past personal experiences is the exclusive domain of humans, but according to Scagel, recent research does not support that conclusion.

"Our study shows that dogs are capable of conceptualization, placing them in an expanding category of other animals that includes bottlenose dolphins and chimpanzees."

Scagel explained that the findings present new flexible training possibilities for dogs.

"Dogs can do more than learn the relationship between a person’s cue and which specific trick they should. They can understand the concept of repetition: Whatever you just did, do that again."

"It can apply to anything they do," she added.

We often test animals on their ability to recall things in the external environment they have recently observed, such as objects, sounds, or scents. Memories of actions are different because they’re not outwardly perceivable.

Memories are entirely internal; they are purely mental representations of previous personal experiences that can be recalled in ways that might influence what the creature chooses to do in the future.

For this study, the researchers looked at dogs' memories of their own recently performed actions to determine if they could voluntarily think back to what they had just been up to and reproduce those actions.

Three dogs participated: Todd, a male long-haired chihuahua belonging to Scagel; and two female golden retrievers — Aspen, belonging to an acquaintance of Scagel’s, and Layla, belonging to Scagel's co-author, Eduardo Mercado III, a UB professor of psychology.