Dogs and humans have been closely connected for at least 15,000 years, sharing many similarities in their social information processing. A recent study sheds new light on the neural processes in the dog brain that play a role in this connection. Researchers from the University of Vienna investigated how dogs’ brains respond to faces and bodies of humans and other dogs, as well as inanimate objects, by taking brain scans of dogs while they viewed various images. The results showed that dogs, like humans, activate specific regions of their brains when they view living objects such as faces or bodies. Interestingly, the researchers observed a special region in the dog brain that is exclusively specialized in the visual perception of body postures – a similar area also exists in the human brain.
This special region in the dog brain helps the animals process and categorize the body posture of their counterparts, which is important for interpreting intentions and emotional states. However, while the basic processes seem to be similar, there are also some differences in the way dogs and humans process social information. While humans have brain regions that are exclusively specialized in processing faces, such an area is missing in dogs. Instead, facial recognition in dogs seems to lie in the regions of the brain involved in body perception. These findings suggest that dogs pay more attention to the overall posture and movement when communicating and interacting, rather than focusing mainly on the face.
Another notable difference between dogs and humans in social perception concerns the sense of smell. In humans, the perception of faces and bodies is limited to visual brain regions only. In dogs, however, areas responsible for processing smells are also activated, even when they are only looking at a picture. These results suggest that in dogs, what they see is more strongly linked to what they smell than in humans. This could be due to the more pronounced sense of smell in dogs, which allows them to have a richer and more differentiated social perception.
Overall, the study’s results show that there are both remarkable similarities and differences in the way dogs and humans process social information. This improves our understanding of social cognition in dogs and provides valuable insights that can help deepen and improve the human-dog relationship.
