Walle didn’t look much like this cute puppy. Photograph by Jennie Marie
The brains of dogs and humans react in the same way when responding to voices according to a new study published in the journal Current Biology.
The same area of the brain activates in both people and dogs when they hear a voice, regardless of whether they are hearing laughing or crying.
Scientists led by Attila Andics of Hungary’s Eötvös Loránd University trained six golden retrievers and five border collies to lie motionless in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner so they could perform the tests in the same way as they did with the 22 volunteer human participants.
The subjects were then played a range of 200 dog and human sounds including whining, crying, playful barking and laughing.
In both dogs and people, the brain region activity changed in similar ways in response to the emotional tone of the sounds, such as crying versus laughing.
The findings showed that dog intelligence and social awareness have deep evolutionary roots, and may even trace back to a common ancestor with humans.