When I was a kid I pressed the "return coin" button on a vending machine at a rest stop and 50¢ came out. Gotta check every single vending machine now.

Us: hahaha silly dog.

Also us: oh a waterfall, I'll check behind it.

I understand, Dusty. I would inspect the magic pie bush every day too. Who turns down a free pie?

My cats did the same thing when they found a mouse. They would stand guard where they first saw it for over a month afterwards.

Me watching Dusty find the pie I left for him in the bushes

I once had a program fail to compile, but when I compiled it a second time it worked. No idea why, best guess is some kind of caching or dependency issue that got resolved by restating the compiler.

Now every time a program fails to compile and it's not immediately obvious what the problem is, I instinctively compile it again just in case. Well more like three or four times.

I might just be a dog though.

This is seen in human society, and is called a Cargo cult

This is my dog after she discovered she could pick her own blackberries. Too bad blackberry season isn't year round because she sure expects it to come back every day.

Our neighborhood has the Magical Chicken Wing bush. The dog thoroughly inspected it for months afterwards, and still checks on it now and then just in case.

It is a well defined psychological principle called Pavlovian response.

There is a part of the dog training book "Total Recall" by Pippa Mattinson that refers to this.

Pie-in-a-bush is her way of explaining the Jackpot reward training method.

Very surreal to see it realised so.

Used to find porn mags in bushes back in my day. They were magic pie bush bushes I tell ya

My dog once found a biscuit* in a bush near our home, from that day onwards he always checked the bush for a biscuit, there never was another one, the bush became known as "The Biscuit Bush"

• Cookie if your American 🍪

Found money in Vietnam once, and was forever looking at every piece of trash on the sides of roads thereafter.

And what if he found a new species of bush that grows pie huh?

This isn't even remotely close to being a meme.

I think you would call this transductive reasoning. Rather than using information to put together a theory and work off that theory you work directly off the evidence

for example hearing a bell and dinner being ready and coming to associate the bell with dinner without ever learning why the bell means dinner

found pie in the bush, there might be pie in that bush

There's a Norwegian prog rock band called Magic Pie, I haven't seen their bush yet though

The fridge won't be empty this time.

The owner should put treats in that bush for Dusty to find.

I think it's just regular Operant Conditioning, but the reward of finding half a pie was so strong that the association will stick to this bush for a lot longer than if it was a smaller one.