Yesterday, at the Wandegeya traffic lights crossing, I noticed a stray dog beside me. I was amused at the way it stopped patiently with the rest of the pedestrians and crossed the road together with them at the right time. That left me thinking, ‘Was the dog just copying what the pedestrians were doing or was it aware of the dangers of crossing the road while vehicles were still moving?’ According to research by Friederike Range and Ludwig Huber, of the University of Vienna, and Zsofia Viranyi, of the Eötvös University in Budapest, dogs, like human infants, do not simply copy an action they observe, but adjust the extent to which they imitate to the circumstances of the action. Normally, dogs prefer to use their mouths when faced with a task of opening a container by pulling a rod. However, in the study, a female dog was trained to open the box with her paw. When the other dogs observed the female's action, they imitated it in order to get the food. However, the dogs imitated selec...