Your dog is counting how many treats you're feeding it

You might think you've fooled your dog when you tell them there aren't any treats left - but they know exactly what you're up to!

Some new research shows that dogs are able to understand the basic concept of numbers and the idea of more and less.

Researchers at Emory University in the US found that if you lie to your dog and say you've got no treats, you could be in trouble.

Because if they saw four treats in your hand earlier, and you only give them two, they know exactly what you're playing at!

How did they test it?

The dogs were led in to a special scanning machine and researchers showed them different numbers of dots on a flashing screen.

The researchers found that the part of the dog's brain that deals with numbers responded to changing number of dots.

So it turns out, dogs can do very basic maths!

Only 11 dogs of varying breeds took part in the study.

None of them had received any advanced training in maths beforehand.

One of the senior authors of the study said: "Our work not only shows that dogs use a similar part of their brain to process numbers of objects as humans do - it shows that they don't need to be trained to do it."