Abstract
Comparing the neural correlates of socio-cognitive skills across species provides insights into the evolution of the social brain and has revealed face- and body-sensitive regions in the primate temporal lobe. Although from a different lineage, dogs share convergent visuo-cognitive skills with humans and a temporal lobe which evolved independently in carnivores. We investigated the neural correlates of face and body perception in dogs (N = 15) and humans (N = 40) using functional MRI. Combining univariate and multivariate analysis approaches, we found functionally analogous occipito-temporal regions involved in the perception of animate entities and bodies in both species, while only humans had regions specialized for face perception. Though unpredicted, we also observed neural representations of faces compared to inanimate objects, and dog compared to human bodies in dog olfactory regions. These findings shed light on the evolutionary foundations of human and dog social cognition and the predominant role of the temporal lobe.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
We substantially revised the manuscript, added a complementary whole-brain univariate analysis, as well as multiple supplementary analyses to control for methodological differences between the species (i.e., sample sizes, search space definitions) and low-level visual properties of the stimulus set (i.e., hue, saturation, contrast).
