Who has never seen a dog stare at its owner, without losing a detail of all its facial movements? It is clear that man’s best friend watches and understands us, but how his brain represents these perceptions is a mystery. How does the dog distinguish man, by sight or by smell? Does it react to language in the same way that it responds to arbitrary sounds, or does it have specific neural structures?
A group of researchers from Emory University (USA) has perfected a method to scan the brains of dogs using magnetic resonance techniques. The results of the first test, published in the journal PLoS ONE , show the region of the canine brain that is activated in response to signals from its owners.
Two dogs participated in the test, one of them had been adopted nine months earlier, and the second had already been trained by its owner to participate in competitions. Both animals were trained to respond to hand signals, one indicating that they were going to receive a piece of sausage, and the other that there was no reward.
The results revealed that when owners gave the reward signal, it activated the caudal region of their brains, an area involved in perception and learning . Furthermore, the activation was more intense in the more trained dog.
“The results indicate that dogs pay a lot of attention to men,” says Gregory Berns, one of the authors. “And these signals seem to have a direct connection to the dog’s satisfaction system.”
This work opens the door to future research on canine ‘thoughts’ and interspecies communication. “We want to understand the dog-man relationship, from the dog’s perspective,” explains Bern.
