Your Dog Probably Loves You AT LEAST as Much as Food
What does your dog love more: your smiling face or a fresh bowl of processed meat goo? A new study from Emory University suggests that praise more than pulls its weight against Kibbles and Bits. Pavlov's dog casts a long shadow over human/dog interaction. Your bond with scruffy might be tender. It might be the defining relationship of your life. But when you watch him hoover up dog chow -- or, let's face it, worse things -- it's easy to see him as little more than a Pavlovian beast, his entire nature warped around the acquisition and consumption of food. Neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his Emory Dog Project team decided to look inside the dog brain for answers, which is to say they took 13 fMRI-trained dogs and taught them to associate three different objects with three different outcomes. A pink truck? That's a food reward, buddy. A blue toy knight?
Verbal praise from your owner! And a hairbrush? Sorry, that doesn't get you anything. The researchers tested all three objects on the dogs in an fMRI for close to 100 trails, then they sat back and observed the neural fireworks. To no one's surprise, the reward stimuli -- the truck and the knight -- resulted in stronger neural activation than the hairbrush. Four of the dogs preferred the praise-stimuli objects, two preferred the food-stimuli object and the nine showed similar activation for both. They followed this up with a y-shaped maze, one branch leading to food, the other to the dog's owner. The dog's behavioral choice at the crossroads matched up closely with their observed neural activity. Most of the dogs were willing to go either way, but the praise-centric dogs from the first experiment went to their owners 80-90 percent of the time. Though the degree of preference can be highly variable on a dog-to-dog level. Future studies may reveal how breed, rearing, and genetic profile play into the situation, as well further illuminate the evolution of the domestic dog. So how does this match up with YOUR human/dog relationships?
Verbal praise from your owner! And a hairbrush? Sorry, that doesn't get you anything. The researchers tested all three objects on the dogs in an fMRI for close to 100 trails, then they sat back and observed the neural fireworks. To no one's surprise, the reward stimuli -- the truck and the knight -- resulted in stronger neural activation than the hairbrush. Four of the dogs preferred the praise-stimuli objects, two preferred the food-stimuli object and the nine showed similar activation for both. They followed this up with a y-shaped maze, one branch leading to food, the other to the dog's owner. The dog's behavioral choice at the crossroads matched up closely with their observed neural activity. Most of the dogs were willing to go either way, but the praise-centric dogs from the first experiment went to their owners 80-90 percent of the time. Though the degree of preference can be highly variable on a dog-to-dog level. Future studies may reveal how breed, rearing, and genetic profile play into the situation, as well further illuminate the evolution of the domestic dog. So how does this match up with YOUR human/dog relationships?
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