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(CNN) – Dogs are not programmed to care about human faces, a new study found, and there is no area in their brain designed to distinguish between the back or the front of someone’s head.
The researchers measured brain activity in dogs and humans while showing them videos of faces and the backs of heads, according to a press release from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.
While faces are very important for visual communication in humans, the same cannot be said for our canine companions.
Experiments with functional magnetic resonance imaging were carried out on 20 dogs at the Eötvös Loránd University and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Querétaro, Mexico, two of the few facilities that can scan the brains of dogs when awake and untethered .
The results revealed that large dedicated neural networks are used in the human brain to differentiate faces from non-faces. In dogs there are no brain regions that fire to differentiate faces.
Instead, dogs use more information from smell or larger body parts, study co-author Attila Andics of Eötvös Loránd University told CNN.
“In dogs, facial cues are no more important than non-facial body cues, acoustic or chemical cues for kin recognition and mate selection,” Andics said.
The full study, described by the researchers as the first of its kind, was published in the Journal of Neuroscience on Monday.
Andics told CNN that dogs care about human faces, even if their brains aren’t specifically tuned to them.
“I think it’s amazing that even though they apparently don’t have specialized neural machinery to process faces, dogs excel at eye contact, following gaze, reading emotions on our face, and can even recognize their owner from expensive, “Andics said. .
“During domestication, dogs adapted to the human social environment and by living with humans, they quickly learn that reading facial cues makes sense, just as humans learn to pay attention to small details, say, a phone, without having areas specialized telephone companies in your brain. “
The researchers will now compare how dog and human brains process other visual categories such as body parts, various species and everyday objects, Andics said.
The team will also investigate whether the dog’s brains have developed different specializations as a result of living with humans, Andics added.
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