Dog owners have long insisted their animals can read a face. A brain-imaging study published on August 7 in the Cell Press journal iScience offers direct neural evidence that dogs do more than sort human expressions into good and bad. They appear to distinguish fear from anger and from sadness.
Researchers scanned awake, unrestrained pet dogs while the animals looked at photographs of unfamiliar people. Happy faces triggered activity in a network the team could reliably separate from every negative expression tested. A whole-brain analysis then went further, identifying activity patterns that distinguished fear from the other two negative expressions. The researchers describe it as the first evidence that dog brains discriminate between specific negative human expressions.
