Overview
- The iScience paper, published Monday, used awake fMRI in trained family dogs to measure brain responses while the animals viewed photos of unfamiliar human faces.
- Researchers found distinct neural patterns when dogs viewed fearful faces compared with angry or sad faces, while the team did not detect a clear difference between anger and sadness.
- Happy faces produced a stronger response in a reward-related brain region, suggesting positive human expressions may be especially salient to dogs.
- The experiments relied on small, highly trained samples (reports cite eight dogs in one task and 14 dogs trained overall) viewing static, visual-only images of strangers without sound or scent.
- Authors warn the results do not prove dogs experience emotions like humans and recommend larger samples, behavioral tasks, and multimodal, naturalistic stimuli to link brain signals to perception and action.