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Posted By Bay Vets Editor
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We have discovered many things about dogs’ perceptual experience of the world, but the ones that are most interesting are in the domain of social understanding and perception. The first question many people ask is, “Does my dog love me?” Without getting into the nuances of love, the question gets to the heart of the dog-human relationship, namely, what are a dog’s motives? Is it all about food, or can dogs experience positive emotions for purely social reasons? To answer the question, an fMRI was used to measure activity in a structure at the heart of the brain’s reward system: the caudate nucleus.
Before scanning, dogs were trained on a simple association test between toys and rewards. The results: 13 of 15 dogs had equal or greater activation for praise than for food. Is that love? We don’t know, but it does show that most dogs have brain systems highly tuned to social rewards, and some even respond more to their owner’s praise than food itself.
How does this social bond form?
Humans, like most primates, are born ready to bond with their parents and other members of their social group. Faces carry a wealth of social information and, in the 1990s, neuroscientists discovered that primates have an area of their visual systems dedicated to processing faces, called the fusiform face area. To see if dogs have equivalent areas, dogs were showed pictures and videos while they were in the MRI scanner. We showed faces (dog and human), objects, scenes, and scrambled images. And just as in humans, we found an area of the dog visual system that is strongly and specifically activated by faces. We called it the “dog face area.” Like the praise experiment, this demonstrates that dogs have more in common with us than we realized, and that they have the basic tools to process human faces.
Can your dog identify you just by your smell?
Dogs cannot only identify us by smell, they seem to like the smell of their human best – so there you have it. You are their MOST favourite thing.
While we humans identify people by their appearance, dogs rely more on their sense of smell. In an early fMRI study, dogs were presented with five scents:
(1) their owner
(2) an unfamiliar person
(3) another dog in their house
(4) an unfamiliar dog
(5) their own scent
Human scents were obtained from underarm pit samples and dog scents from the area that dogs like to smell—their butts.
Although it was expected findings would show the strongest response to be the smell of other dogs, in fact we found that the scent of the owner elicited the greatest activation in the reward system of the dog’s brain.
Source: Prof. Gregory Berns MD., Ph.D Decoding the canine mind, Emory University, April 15 2020
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