You may think your dog is excited to see your face, but research published on Monday suggests that unfortunately, it probably isn’t.
A study in the journal Ne Neuroscience showed that dogs do not wire to focus on the human face. What makes their brains spark is a glimpse of another dog. Human vision? Not more
MRI While both humans and dogs – both humans and dogs – were watching videos through scans, Hungarian scientists learned that dogs do not do this when humans have a special brain area, when the face is visible. However, both dogs and humans have an area of the brain that sparks when a member of the same species comes to mind.
“The face is the center of human visual communication … and the human brain is special to the faces,” said study co-author Attilax Ndix, an animal behavior researcher at Atvas Lorend University in Budapest. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for a man’s best friend.
Sndix, the dog pays attention to human faces. “They read emotions from the face and they can recognize people from the face alone, but other physical cues seem equally informative to them.”
In other words, dogs also consider our faces and the expressions on them, but they use all sorts of information, such as body language and voice signals, to tell us what to do. Humans, on the other hand, value much more than what they see on the face.
To see if humans and dogs are treated the same way, Nix Nix and his colleagues recruited 30 humans and 20 dogs who were family pets. In the experiment, every human and every dog is lying in an MRI machine while a series of two-second videos are shown: the dog’s face, the back of the dog’s head, the human face and the back of the human head. The order in which the different videos were shown with each video.
Getting a dog still in a loud MRI scanner is both a challenge and a challenge.
“They’ve been training for months,” Ndix said. Dogs are taught that “they can’t move a bit during the measurement.” He added: “Trained dogs are happy volunteers in these experiments, not forced or controlled in any way. They can leave the scanner at any time if they want. “
When they analyzed brain scans, researchers showed more light in the visual areas of the human brain when they showed a human face compared to the back of the head. The human brain was more active when a person’s video was playing more than one than a dog. When it comes to dogs, brain activity does not change whether the face or the back of the head was observed. When the videos showed the dog, the brains of the dogs were more active than humans in the videos.
From an evolutionary point of view, the results of the study mean, says Dr. A.S. Said Carlo Siracusa.
“Mother Nature will not invest in something that is not related to existence, even in dog-to-dog or wolf-to-wolf interactions,” said Syracuse, who was not involved in the new study. “They use other ways of communicating, such as the position of the ear – which can be seen from front to back. The position of the ears will tell about the mood of the dog. We humans do not move our ears. ”
Dogs also use chemical communication more than humans, he said. The smell of the other dog will reveal whether that dog might be interested or not.
But dogs have evolved to pay attention to human faces because they, too, have evolved to be dependent on humans, Syracuse said. “They try to understand what human beings want from facial expressions,” he added. “How likely it is that they will get something to eat instead of punishment. They are like toddlers. ”
Dr. Catherine Hoop was not surprised by the new findings. “We always pay attention to people’s faces, but dogs keep an eye on all of us,” said Hupt, a professor at Cortelle University College of Veterinary Medicine. “Dogs have other ways [evaluating] People. ”
Experiments have shown that dogs go to someone who has behaved selfishly, such as refusing to help someone open a jar or share certain cookies, Hupet said, which was not associated with the Hungarian study.
But for those who are saddened by these findings, Heupt reassures: “Your dog loves you, not just your face.”
Follow NBC Health on Twitter & Facebook.
