Your Smile Lights Up Your Dog’s Brain

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SCI107: Does your dog know when you’re happy? A new study in iScience went looking inside the canine brain for the answer, and found that a human smile registers as something rewarding.

Caroline Knight walks Lindsay Sant and Lino Saubolle through the research, led by University of Vienna scientists. Family dogs, trained ahead of time to lie still in an MRI scanner, stayed awake and unrestrained, free to walk out whenever they liked, while photos of strangers’ faces appeared on a screen in front of them.

In the first experiment, eight dogs, six of them Border Collies, saw the same people smiling and looking neutral. Happy faces produced a stronger response in a cluster of the brain that reached the caudate nucleus, a region earlier dog studies tied to anticipating food and smelling a familiar person. The researchers also checked brightness, contrast, and color to make sure the dogs weren’t simply reacting to a brighter photo.

The second experiment added sadness, fear, and anger, and used machine learning to read the scans. The dogs’ brain activity told happy faces from sad ones about 70% of the time, and from fearful and angry faces at lower but still better-than-chance rates. A whole-brain representational similarity analysis then found regions that separated fear from sadness and fear from anger, suggesting fear holds a special place for dogs. Caroline is careful about the limits: none of this proves a dog understands what you feel, only that its brain responds differently to different human expressions.

Then come the stories. Caroline describes how her own dogs took their cue from her calm on a frightening night and settled back to sleep. Lindsay talks about his dog Luna, her pack instincts, and the bedtime habit she picked up while he was away, and Lino praises guide dogs and how closely all dogs tune in to the people they love. It all points back to the long partnership between dogs and humans.

If you’ve ever wondered whether dogs understand human emotions, or whether your dog can tell when you’re sad, here’s what the brain scans say. Smile at your dog.

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