Exploring the dog–human relationship by combining fMRI, eye-tracking and behavioural measures

Abstract

Behavioural studies revealed that the dog–human relationship resembles the human mother–child bond, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we report the results of a multi-method approach combining fMRI (N = 17), eye-tracking (N = 15), and behavioural preference tests (N = 24) to explore the engagement of an attachment-like system in dogs seeing human faces. We presented morph videos of the caregiver, a familiar person, and a stranger showing either happy or angry facial expressions. Regardless of emotion, viewing the caregiver activated brain regions associated with emotion and attachment processing in humans. In contrast, the stranger elicited activation mainly in brain regions related to visual and motor processing, and the familiar person relatively weak activations overall. While the majority of happy stimuli led to increased activation of the caudate nucleus associated with reward processing, angry stimuli led to activations in limbic regions. Both the eye-tracking and preference test data supported the superior role of the caregiver’s face and were in line with the findings from the fMRI experiment. While preliminary, these findings indicate that cutting across different levels, from brain to behaviour, can provide novel and converging insights into the engagement of the putative attachment system when dogs interact with humans.

Functionally analogous body- and animacy-responsive areas in the dog (Canis familiaris) and human occipito-temporal lobe

“…Therefore, we first compared activation levels associated with the visual presentation of all stimuli compared to implicit baseline (i.e., white cross presented on grey background) using the localizer data set. This revealed taskresponsive activation within the occipital-, splenial-, ectomarginal-, caudal-, medial suprasylvian-and marginal gyri, partially overlapping with results from previous studies investigating face perception [29, [39][40][41][42]57,58] (Fig 1C, Table S1). We then used anatomical masks [51] of these regions as search spaces for the dog participants (Fig 2A).…”

“…Behavioural [7,34,35,44,70–73] and imaging studies [58,59] have also demonstrated that dogs are able to perceive facial and bodily cues of dogs and humans and display high responsiveness to ostensive-referential bodily cues [45,46,74,75], already as puppies [76]. Our results do not contradict these findings, but suggest that visual regions involved in the perception of faces are also involved in the perception of other body parts, and may thus encode animate stimuli.…”

Enhancing the Selection and Performance of Working Dogs

“…On one end of the spectrum, free-ranging dogs live largely on the outskirts of society, interacting minimally with humans other than to scavenge for food (4). On the other end of the spectrum, pet dogs are welcomed into our homes (5) and beds (6), valued for their companionship, and can evoke emotional reactions analogous to those in the parent-child bond (7)(8)(9). Within this patchwork of human-dog interconnectedness, working dogs represent a small subset of the dog population, but one that can have profound effects on human health and well-being.…”

Dogs follow human misleading suggestions more often when the informant has a false belief

“…Based on the results of experiment 1, we decided to compare dogs considered as cooperative workers (here: border collies) to independent workers (here: terriers) in experiment 3. Terriers were chosen because they had shown the initially hypothesized response pattern in experiment 1; border collies because they have been extensively tested in studies on social cognition in our and other laboratories [69][70][71].…”