Overview
- The University of Vienna team published a peer‑reviewed iScience paper on Monday reporting that human smiles selectively activated a right temporal‑caudate network in dogs, a pattern linked to reward processing.
- Researchers scanned trained, awake pet dogs using fMRI in two experiments (Experiment 1 n = 8; Experiment 2 n = 12; 14 dogs trained overall) while showing static images of unfamiliar human faces.
- Whole‑brain representational‑similarity and machine‑learning analyses produced distinct neural patterns that separated fear from anger and sadness but did not reliably separate anger from sadness.
- The authors caution the results are limited by small, highly trained and breed‑skewed pet samples plus use of static, stranger faces, and they explicitly say fMRI cannot reveal whether dogs subjectively experience human emotions the way people do.
- Beyond confirming behavioral work, the findings suggest domestication shaped dogs' neural sensitivity to human cues and point to practical follow‑ups using voices, bodies, scents, active tasks, and broader dog populations to test real‑world generality.