Our Faces in the Dog's Brain: Functional Imaging Reveals Temporal Cortex Activation during Perception of Human Faces

摘要: Dogs have a rich social relationship with humans. One fundamental aspect of it is how dogs pay close attention to human faces in order guide their behavior, for example, by recognizing owner and his/her emotional state using visual cues. It well known that humans specific brain regions the processing other faces, yet unclear dogs' brains process faces. For this reason, our study focuses on describing correlates perception functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We trained seven domestic remain awake, still unrestrained inside an MRI scanner. used stimulation paradigm block design compare activity elicited against everyday objects. Brain related changed significantly several regions, but mainly bilateral temporal cortex. The opposite contrast (i.e., objects faces) showed no significant change. cortex part ventral pathway, results are consistent reports species like primates sheep, suggest high degree evolutionary conservation pathway face processing. This introduces as candidate pillar cognition dogs.