Dogs show human-like brain activity when they restrain themselves
When we tell a dog “no”, and it resists temptation, what happens in its brain?
Eötvös Loránd University
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When we tell a dog “no”, and it resists temptation, what happens in its brain? New research from the Department of Ethology at ELTE and the HUN-REN Research Centre of Natural Sciences suggests that dogs may do more than respond automatically: when they restrain their behaviour, their brains show a pattern of activity resembling the human neural signature of self-control.
view moreCredit: Photo: Gáti Oszkár Dániel
When we tell a dog “no”, and it resists temptation, what happens in its brain? New research from the Department of Ethology at ELTE and the HUN-REN Research Centre of Natural Sciences suggests that dogs may do more than respond automatically: when they restrain their behaviour, their brains show a pattern of activity resembling the human neural signature of self-control.
Survival and adaptation are not only about what we do, but our ability to stop ourselves at any given moment can also be almost as important. Think of a mouse that stops moving when a predator is nearby or a human who successfully gives up smoking after years of torturing their own health.
These examples illustrate that the capacity to stop a behaviour or resist a temptation can be achieved by different mechanisms. The freezing response of the mouse is ancient and automatic, whereas when a human gives up smoking, they must invoke conscious effort and willpower. In humans, this kind of self-control relies on the youngest part of the brain’s self-control system – the frontal lobes. When neural activity is measured with electroencephalography (EEG), their involvement is reflected in increased frontal “theta” waves.
What happens in dogs’ brains when their owner commands them to stop and restrain themselves? Dogs can learn not to grab things within reach even when they are interesting or to their taste. But do their brains solve this problem automatically or deliberately? Researchers from Budapest, Hungary, decided to tackle this question using awake, non-invasive EEG measurement.
“We measured 226 short EEG recordings, each around half a minute long, from fourteen dogs who for the duration of a recording were either obeying a command or idle” explains Iotchev from the HUN-REN Research Centre of Natural Sciences, “this data was then analyzed to see if within and across dogs, theta waves are more pronounced for recordings in which the animals were obeying the restraint command. The absence of such an effect would have left open the possibility that dogs obey commands automatically, but what we observed does not align with this interpretation -- during self-control situations, we instead observed EEG activity that resembles human theta in both frequency and localisation.”
The study was conducted under the supervision of Anna Kis and Márta Gácsi, who have investigated for many years how dogs could help us understand human conditions like ADHD or obesity. “Dogs live and age faster than humans but move in the same environments and adapt to the same social and physical challenges,” explains Gácsi. “This means that developmental and age-related factors associated with pathological conditions can be examined more time-efficiently than in human populations.”
Kis adds, “In humans, failures in the function of the frontal lobes play a role in both ADHD and abnormal weight gain. The ability to measure the EEG correlates of frontal lobe involvement in dogs will allow us to investigate just how close these conditions in dogs resemble their human counterparts and allow us to extrapolate better predictions for humans, too.”Iotchev places the findings within a bigger picture: “The frontal lobes of a dog have received surprisingly little attention so far, given how many people believe that their pawed companions have a rich inner life. We know a lot more about this part of the brain as it operates in the rat. As we have demonstrated that non-invasive EEG, which is cheaper and easier to implement than the fMRI measurement, can also be of use, this opens the door to many more future studies on mental processes and their neural substrate in the dog.”
The study is published in Animal Cognition, where it first appeared online on the 11th of August https://rdcu.be/fzvNa
Journal
Animal Cognition
Article Title
A human-like EEG signature of cognitive control in the domestic dog
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