It’s not exactly reading a dog’s mind, but it’s at least having a sneak peek. Researchers can now work out what a dog is looking at, just by examining a scan of its brain.
Over the last few years researchers have shown what dog owners long suspected: our furry friends can recognise human facial expressions. For instance, a 2015 study showed that dogs know the difference between a happy face and an angry face ().
Now Laura Verónica Cuaya and her colleagues at the in Mexico City have investigated how they do it. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of four border collies, who had been trained to sit still in the scanner.
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The dogs were shown four facial expressions – happy, sad, angry or fearful – made by humans unknown to them, and the fMRI recorded their brain patterns.
By looking at distributed patterns of activity across the whole brain, the researchers could tell what facial expression each dog had seen. A computer algorithm was able to spot small sites of activity – representing clusters of firing neurons – that appeared in certain locations, depending on what human emotion the dogs had seen. It was therefore possible to predict what emotion the dogs had seen just by looking at this brain activity.
Human-like dogs
The find mirrors a recent study of the human brain. Earlier this year, Japanese researchers revealed an AI that could figure out what image a person was looking at, just by examining a scan of their brain.
Notably, Cuaya’s team found that seeing a person with a happy face produced a particularly distinctive pattern of brain activity, particularly in the temporal cortex on the side of the brain. This part of the brain is thought to be involved in processing complex visual information, including faces, in humans and .
“This is a really similar activity to human processing of emotions in general,” says Cuaya.
However, it was harder to discriminate between the more “negative” emotions, especially anger and sadness.
They’re reading our minds
The work is further evidence that domestic dogs, as they adapted to live alongside us, acquired the ability to read human facial expressions, says dog cognition expert at Columbia University in New York.
“It’s another verification of their astute attention to us,” she says. “I like to think of dogs as ‘canine anthropologists’ among us, carefully noting our behaviour patterns.”
The findings “definitely demonstrate the high sensitivity of the dog brain to human emotions,” says at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. However, she says the sample size is too small to draw strong conclusions about what the dogs’ brains are doing.
Cuaya agrees, and adds that the border collies the team used may not be representative of all dogs. They are often working dogs and consequently spend a lot of time interpreting human expressions and instructions.
bioRxiv
