Can dogs tell fear from sadness? Brain scans may reveal answer
- On Monday, researchers published a study in the journal iScience finding that canine brains possess specialized neural networks to distinguish human facial expressions beyond simple positive or negative valences.
- University of Vienna neuroscientists Laura Cuaya and Raúl Hernández-Pérez trained 14 dogs to lie still inside MRI scanners while viewing human faces, enabling real-time brain activity measurement without sedation.
- Happy human faces selectively activated the temporal cortex and caudate nucleus, a reward center, suggesting that smiles carry intrinsic motivational value for dogs similar to treats.
- Distinct neural signatures emerged when dogs viewed negative expressions, with researchers identifying that canine brains differentiate fear from anger and sadness rather than lumping all negative moods together.
- Thousands of years of domestication have wired the canine brain to decode subtle human signals, providing direct evidence that dogs evolved sophisticated social skills through their 14,000-year shared history with humans.
38 Articles
38 Articles
(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Lee Joo-young = It is well known that dogs can gauge a person's mood to some extent by looking at their facial expressions, but simply dividing mood into 'good' or 'bad'...
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Can dogs tell fear from sadness? Brain scans may reveal answer
Researchers peered inside the brains of dogs as they viewed images of various human expressions for a new study.
Your Dog Really Can Tell When You're Happy
A very cooperative border collie undergoes an fMRI. —Photo by Laura CuayaIf you’ve ever suspected your dog can read your mind—sussing out through some canine intuition when you’re happy, sad, scared, or cross—you’re half right. Many dogs can do exactly that, but it’s not mind-reading that’s involved: it’s face-reading. That’s the word from a new study in the journal iScience, in which researchers not only established dogs’ ability to discern hum…
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