Mind Reading – How does a dog's brain express what it sees?

The findings suggest that dogs are more sensitive to behavior in their surroundings than to who or what is doing their actions

The researchers recorded data from the functional MRI nerves of two awake, unconstrained dogs, and had them watch the 30-minute video in three separate doses, for a total of 90 minutes

Gregory Berns, a professor of psychology at Emory University and corresponding author of the paper, said: "We showed that we can monitor the activity of a dog's brain as it watches a video and reconstruct what

The project was inspired by recent advances in machine learning and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, which can decode visual stimuli from the human brain, providing new insights into

Erin Phillips, the paper's first author, said: "Although our study was based on only two dogs, it proved the notion

Berns and his colleagues pioneered training techniques that let dogs walk into functional magnetic resonance imaging scanners and remain completely stationary and unconstrained

Over the years, his lab has published research

At the same time, the technology behind machine learning computer algorithms is constantly improving

"I started thinking, 'Can we apply similar technology to dogs?'" Berns recalls

The first challenge is to come up with video content that the dog might find interesting and can be watched for a long time

They made an hour and a half of video with this device that recorded scenes

Video data is timestamped into various classifiers, including object-based classifiers (such as dogs, cars, people, cats) and action-based classifiers (such as sniffing, playing, or eating

Of the dogs trained in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, only two dogs had enough attention and temperament to lie completely still and watch 30 minutes of video, including three for a total of 90 minutes

"They don't even need food," the scientists monitored the animals during functional magnetic resonance imaging and observed the trajectory

Two people also performed the same experiment, lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging, watching the same 30-minute video

Brain data can be mapped to the video classifier with

The findings suggest that there are significant differences
in the way human and dog brains work.

"We humans are very object-oriented," Berns said
.
"In English, the number of nouns is 10 times that of verbs, because we are particularly obsessed with the naming
of objects.
Dogs seem to care less about who or what they see than about the action itself
.
”

Berns notes that the visual systems of dogs and people are also very different
.
Dogs only see shades of blue and yellow, but their visual receptors are slightly denser, which are used to detect movement
.

"It makes perfect sense that a dog's brain is highly coordinated with the movements in the
first place," he said.
Animals must be very attentive to what is happening in the environment to avoid being eaten, or to monitor animals
they may want to hunt.
Action and movement are the most important
.
”

Erin M.
Phillips, Kirsten D.
Gillette, Daniel D.
Dilks, Gregory S.
Berns.
Through a Dog's Eyes: fMRI Decoding of Naturalistic Videos from the Dog Cortex.
Journal of Visualized Experiments, 2022