Why Did the Dog Walk Into the MRI?

Abstract

Because he was trained to. The domestic dog’s accessibility, social intelligence, and evolutionary history with humans have led to increasing interest in canine cognition. Despite a growing body of data on canine behavior and cognitive skills, relatively few advances have been made in understanding canine brain function. Practical and ethical concerns had limited the use of the invasive brain-imaging techniques typically used with primate and rodent models. However, the demonstration that dogs can be trained to cooperatively participate in fMRI studies has opened up a wealth of new data about canine brain function. Many of these studies have investigated the dog’s preternatural social intelligence, focusing on neural pathways associated with different types of reward, including social reward, and face and vocal processing. These studies have implications for our understanding of canine brain function, and potentially, because of dogs’ close relations with humans, for models of human development and pathology.