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. 2021 Mar;24(2):251-266.
doi: 10.1007/s10071-021-01475-7. Epub 2021 Feb 18.

Dog-human social relationship: representation of human face familiarity and emotions in the dog brain

Andie M Thompkins  1 , Lucia Lazarowski  2   3 , Bhavitha Ramaiahgari  4 , Sai Sheshan Roy Gotoor  4 , Paul Waggoner  3 , Thomas S Denney  2   4   5   6 , Gopikrishna Deshpande  2   4   5   6   7   8 , Jeffrey S Katz  2   4   5   6
Affiliations

Dog-human social relationship: representation of human face familiarity and emotions in the dog brain

Andie M Thompkins et al. Anim Cogn. 2021 Mar.

Abstract

This study investigated the behavioral and neural indices of detecting facial familiarity and facial emotions in human faces by dogs. Awake canine fMRI was used to evaluate dogs' neural response to pictures and videos of familiar and unfamiliar human faces, which contained positive, neutral, and negative emotional expressions. The dog-human relationship was behaviorally characterized out-of-scanner using an unsolvable task. The caudate, hippocampus, and amygdala, mainly implicated in reward, familiarity and emotion processing, respectively, were activated in dogs when viewing familiar and emotionally salient human faces. Further, the magnitude of activation in these regions correlated with the duration for which dogs showed human-oriented behavior towards a familiar (as opposed to unfamiliar) person in the unsolvable task. These findings provide a bio-behavioral basis for the underlying markers and functions of human-dog interaction as they relate to familiarity and emotion in human faces.

Keywords: Dog cognition; Dog neuroimaging; Dog–human social bond; Emotion; Facial emotions; Facial familiarity; fMRI.

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