Awake canine fMRI predicts dogs’ preference for praisevsfood

Abstract

Dogs are hypersocial with humans, and their integration into human social ecology makes dogs a unique model for studying cross-species social bonding. However, the proximal neural mechanisms driving dog–human social interaction are unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging in 15 awake dogs to probe the neural basis for their preferences for social interaction and food reward. In a first experiment, we used the ventral caudate as a measure of intrinsic reward value and compared activation to conditioned stimuli that predicted food, praise or nothing. Relative to the control stimulus, the caudate was significantly more active to the reward-predicting stimuli and showed roughly equal or greater activation to praise vs food in 13 of 15 dogs. To confirm that these differences were driven by the intrinsic value of social praise, we performed a second imaging experiment in which the praise was withheld on a subset of trials. The difference in caudate activation to the receipt of praise, relative to its withholding, was strongly correlated with the differential activation to the conditioned stimuli in the first experiment. In a third experiment, we performed an out-of-scanner choice task in which the dog repeatedly selected food or owner in a Y-maze. The relative caudate activation to food- and praise-predicting stimuli in Experiment 1 was a strong predictor of each dog’s sequence of choices in the Y-maze. Analogous to similar neuroimaging studies of individual differences in human social reward, our findings demonstrate a neural mechanism for preference in domestic dogs that is stable within, but variable between, individuals. Moreover, the individual differences in the caudate responses indicate the potentially higher value of social than food reward for some dogs and may help to explain the apparent efficacy of social interaction in dog training.

Comparing trainers’ reports of clicker use to the use of clickers in applied research studies: methodological differences may explain conflicting results

“…Web5 advised to "[give]…food one time, then play with a toy, then just rub his ears and praise him." In fact, in a non-learning context, a recent study using fMRI and preference tests suggested that some dogs prefer social praise over food rewards (Cook et al 2016). Another study found that dogs preferred petting over praise (Feuerbacher and Wynne 2015).…”

Canine sense of quantity: evidence for numerical ratio-dependent activation in parietotemporal cortex

“…Censoring was performed with respect to both signal intensity and motion, in which voxels with greater than 3% signal change from the mean and volumes with more than 1 mm of scan-to-scan movement were flagged as spurious and censored from further analysis. Smoothing, normalization, and motion correction parameters were identical to those described in previous studies [25]. The Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTs) software [26] was used to spatially normalize the mean of the motion-corrected functional images to the individual dog’s structural image.…”

Decoding Odor Mixtures in the Dog Brain: An Awake fMRI Study

“…Regions that are said to support conditioned associations to odor 97 stimuli include the orbitofrontal and perirhinal cortices when learning odor categories. Even on 98 the first day of conditioning, activity within the hippocampus predicted the olfactory 99 associations that would be remembered one week later (Howard, Kahnt, & Gottfried, 2016 show differential activation in the reward processing regions of the brain such as the caudate nucleus to social or food rewards (Cook, Prichard, Spivak, & Berns, 2016). And dogs show higher 137 activation in the amygdala and caudate to odors associated with familiar humans and dogs than 138 to odors of strangers .…”