We have already discovered that dogs know how we feel due to the voice area of the brain, which functions in a similar way to humans. Now, a team of researchers from Emory University (USA) has discovered that an area of the canine brain associated with reward responds more strongly to the smells of human beings that are familiar to them than to the smells of other beings humans.
The experiment was based on the emotional reaction that people have when we smell the perfume or cologne of someone we love. Thus, an attempt was made to verify that the same process occurs in dogs by capturing images of the brains of dogs when exposed to different odors. Considering that smell is perhaps the most important sense in dogs , the response to smell was predicted even more important.
For the study, which has been published in the journal Behavioral Processes , the researchers relied on “scent donors” as people could not be physically in the same location as dogs to prove that canine brain responses are elicited by biological odors, as people are related to those odors distant in space and time.
In addition, 12 dogs of different breeds participated. The dogs smelled up to 5 different scents coming from dogs and humans (both familiar and strange). Dog odors were extracted by rubbing sterile gauze in the genital area and human odors were taken from the armpits with the same procedure.
The results showed that the five scents had elicited a similar response in the area of the canine brain involved in the detection of odors, however, the brain response was much more intense as well as a positive association, for the odors of the dogs. familiar human beings .
The results show that dog brains have mental representations of us and these representations persist even when we are not there physically .
