Dogs are less likely to follow bad advice from humans, according to a new study which found that, in contrast to kids, the canines only copy a person’s actions if they are absolutely necessary for solving the task at hand.

“Children tend to copy all of a teacher’s actions, regardless of whether they are necessary or not,” said Laurie Santos, director of the Canine Cognition Centre at Yale University in the US. The new study shows that dogs will leave out irrelevant actions when there is a more efficient way to solve a problem, even when a human repeatedly demonstrates these actions.

“Although dogs are highly social animals, they draw the line at copying irrelevant actions,” said lead author Angie Johnston, Ph.D student at Yale. “Dogs are surprisingly human-like in their ability to learn from social cues, such as pointing, so we were surprised to find that dogs ignored the human demonstrator and learned how to solve the puzzle on their own,” Johnston said.

“One reason we’re so excited about these results is that they highlight a unique aspect of human learning,” said Johnston.