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Dog owners may love their pet’s endearing puppy eyes and cute furry features, but it turns out that the dog’s brain is just as excited from the back of our heads as it is from the front.
Despite having developed facial expressions that tug at the heart of their owners, researchers have found that, unlike humans, dogs do not have brain regions that specifically respond to faces.
“It’s amazing that dogs do so well when it comes to reading emotions and identifying on faces, even though they don’t seem to have a brain designed to focus on [them]”Said Dr. Attila Andics, study co-author from Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary.
In a Journal of Neuroscience article, Andics and his colleagues report how they scanned the brains of 20 family dogs, including Labradors and Border Collies, and 30 humans, and each showed six sequences of 48 videos from the front or back of a human or a dog. head.
The team found that particular regions of the dog’s brain showed different activity depending on the species shown, with a greater response to dog videos. However, there was no difference in any region when the dogs were shown a human or dog face compared to the back of the head.
In contrast, regions of the human brain showed different activity depending on whether a face or the back of the head was shown, and faces generally generated a stronger response.
A small subset of these regions also showed a difference between species, generally showing a stronger response to humans.
Andics said that further analysis showed that the dog’s brain focused primarily on whether the animal was looking at a dog or a human, while the human brain primarily focused on whether there was a face.
While previous work has suggested that dogs have separate areas of the brain for processing human and dog faces, Andics said the new results suggest that these studies could be detecting responses to other differences in the images, such as dog breed.
Andics said the new results suggested the dogs weren’t very reliant on faces when it came to communicating, but that didn’t mean the dogs were completely ignorant of them. Rather, he said, the dogs’ brains weren’t designed to specifically target faces, something that could be related to the animals receiving a lot of body signals.
Professor Sophie Scott, director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said that different networks in the human brain were known to process different aspects of information in faces. But the study suggests that the canine brain works differently.
“The dog face system just says ‘it’s a dog or a human’ and it really doesn’t care about faces,” he said, noting that the findings contrast with research showing that both dogs and humans have particular brain regions. involved in voice processing.
The results, Scott added, suggest that dogs may be less reliant on faces than other information. “One of the main ways that dogs know who their friends are and what they are doing is their smell,” he said.
But Dr. Daniel Dilks, an expert on the human visual cortex at Emory University, said the study did not conclusively prove that there was no specific brain region for the face in dogs. “The discovery of a [brain] region in dogs [that only responds to images of dogs] it’s intriguing, but only 50% of the dogs tested showed such a region, “he added. “It will be important to understand why half of the dogs exhibit such a bark, while the other half do not.”
