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Decoding Human Emotional Faces in the Dog’s Brain

Raúl Hernández-Pérez, View ORCID ProfileLuis Concha, Laura V. Cuaya
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/134080
Raúl Hernández-Pérez
1Instituto de Neurobiología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Querétaro, México
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Luis Concha
1Instituto de Neurobiología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Querétaro, México
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  • ORCID record for Luis Concha
Laura V. Cuaya
1Instituto de Neurobiología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Querétaro, México
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  • For correspondence: lauravcuaya@inb.unam.mx
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Abstract

Dogs can interpret emotional human faces (especially the ones expressing happiness), yet the cerebral correlates of this process are unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we studied eight awake and unrestrained dogs. In Experiment 1 dogs observed happy and neutral human faces, and found increased brain activity when viewing happy human faces in temporal cortex and caudate. In Experiment 2 the dogs were presented with human faces expressing happiness, anger, fear, or sadness. Using the resulting cluster from Experiment 1 we trained a linear support vector machine classifier to discriminate between pairs of emotions and found that it could only discriminate between happiness and the other emotions. Finally, evaluation of the whole-brain fMRI time courses through a similar classifier allowed us to predict the emotion being observed by the dogs. Our results show that human emotions are specifically represented in dogs’ brains, highlighting their importance for inter-species communication.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 24, 2018.
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Decoding Human Emotional Faces in the Dog’s Brain
Raúl Hernández-Pérez, Luis Concha, Laura V. Cuaya
bioRxiv 134080; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/134080
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Decoding Human Emotional Faces in the Dog’s Brain
Raúl Hernández-Pérez, Luis Concha, Laura V. Cuaya
bioRxiv 134080; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/134080

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