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Researchers from the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University have found that the brains of dogs and humans weight each other’s visual information differently. While the human brain is particularly sensitive to faces, it is not typical for dogs. The results of a unique investigation can help to better understand the organization of the brain and the evolutionary development of social functions.
This is the first research to directly and non-invasively compare the brain responses of a non-primate species and humans to visual stimuli. The study was carried out in international collaboration to be able to measure the brain responses of more individuals than in most previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in dogs.
The ELTE ethologists’ research involved dogs who, with the participation of their owner, were taught to stay awake, immobilized, on the MRI scanner. To date, only a few research groups in the world have been able to teach family dogs to do so, and now two of them, the aforementioned Hungarian and Mexican groups (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Neurobiología), have been have teamed up to perform the unique tests.
Twenty dogs and thirty people participated in the functional magnetic resonance imaging, in which short video clips were projected showing the heads of other dogs and people from the front and back. The study revealed striking similarities and differences between the brain responses of dogs and humans. An important similarity is that there are also so-called race-sensitive brain areas in the brain of dogs and humans that encode whether the observer sees an individual belonging to or different from his own species.
“Our research team has previously identified breed-sensitive brain areas in both dogs and humans through hearing tests. It has now been revealed that species sensitivity is also an important systematization principle in the mammalian brain in the case of processing visual stimuli ”, explains Attila Andics, lead author of the research.
However, a significant difference is that in dogs, the researchers did not observe an area of the brain called the sensitive face that would code to see a face or something else, such as the back of the head, whereas it is well known that faces they play a prominent role in the human brain.
“Analysis of brain response patterns confirmed that in dogs, breed preference is paramount over facial preference, while in humans, general facial preference is paramount over breed preference. This is a fundamental difference suggesting a significant difference between mammalian species in cortical facial processing. Our results also shed light on functional MRI studies that have reported face-sensitive brain areas in dogs: we believe that sensitivity to dogs’ faces in previous experiments does not actually cover brain sensitivity to the face, but to the partner. of the race “. – says Nóra Bunford, joint first author of the study, coordinator of the functional magnetic resonance data collection in Hungary.
The researchers also identified brain areas in the brains of dogs and humans that showed a similar pattern of activity. This was typical when both the man and the dog saw a photo of their own breed partner.
Interestingly, the brain activity of the two species was more similar when each looked at the faces of an individual of their own species than when both looked at the faces of dogs. That is, it was not the physical similarity of the visual stimuli that triggered similar activities in the two species, but what these images meant to the viewer. In other words, we have certainly demonstrated here a brain mechanism that is not responsible for representing low-level visual characteristics but higher-level social categories ”, explains Raúl Hernández-Pérez, another first author of the study, data collection coordinator for fMRI in Mexico .
Partly similar, partly very different are the brain’s organizing principles that determine how humans and dogs view each other. This is further proof that comparing distant mammal species with imaging methods can make a significant contribution to a more accurate understanding of the organization of the brain and the evolutionary development of social functions. “ Summarize Attila Andics.
The research, supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Momentum Program, the New National Program of Excellence, the National Council for Science and Technology in Mexico, the National Office for Research, Development and Innovation and the Eötvös Loránd University, is published in The Journal of Neuroscience. published in the journal “Comparative Brain Imaging Reveals Similar and Divergent Patterns of Species and Face Sensitivity in Humans and Dogs.”
Source: Eötvös Loránd University, Department of Ethology
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