Your Smile Lights Up Your Dog’s Brain

So for years, scientists have known that dogs are remarkably good at responding to human behavior and emotions.

But here's a more interesting question.

What happens inside the dog's brain when it does look at a human face? So There is a new study that's been published recently in Eye Science, and it may give a glimpse into the answer.

So researchers scanned the brains of dogs while they looked at photographs of human faces showing different emotions.

They found that happy human faces produce a particularly strong response in the dog's brain.

They also found evidence that in negative emotions such as fear and sadness also changes the pattern of brain activity.

So let's get into how they actually discovered this.

Then we'll talk about the experimentation.

So researchers carried out two experiments.

They each designed it to answer the slightly different question.

So the first experiment asked whether a dog's brain can respond differently to a human happy face compared to a neutral face.

So they got eight healthy family dogs.

Six were border collies, one was a Labrador and one was a golden retriever.

Those dogs are like happy all the time

anyway.

Just want to mention that.

And their ages range from about a year to about four and a half years old.

So what happened is...

And so they had trained the dogs basically beforehand to sit in an MRI because, you know, you can't just put a dog in an MRI and just expect it to know what to do.

So they did train them first.

Yeah.

So these trained MRI dogs were awake.

They were unrestrained during the experiment and they were free to just leave anytime.

So they settled the dogs and then the researchers projected photographs onto a screen.

And it was about one and a half meters in front of them.