RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 2D or Not 2D? An FMRI Study of How Dogs Visually Process Objects
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.06.04.134064
DO 10.1101/2020.06.04.134064
A1 Prichard, Ashley
A1 Chhibber, Raveena
A1 Athanassiades, Kate
A1 Chiu, Veronica
A1 Spivak, Mark
A1 Berns, Gregory S.
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/05/2020.06.04.134064.abstract
AB Given humans’ habitual use of screens, they rarely consider potential differences when viewing two dimensional (2D) stimuli and real-world versions of dimensional stimuli. Dogs also have access to many forms of screens and touch pads, with owners even subscribing to dog-directed content. Humans understand that 2D stimuli are representations of real-world objects, but do dogs? In canine cognition studies, 2D stimuli are almost always used to study what is normally 3D, like faces, and may assume that both 2D and 3D stimuli are represented in the brain the same way. Here, we used awake fMRI of 15 dogs to examine the neural mechanisms underlying dogs’ perception of two- and three-dimensional objects after the dogs were trained on either a two- or three-dimensional version of the objects. Activation within reward processing regions and parietal cortex of the dog brain to 2D and 3D versions of objects was determined by their training experience, as dogs trained on one dimensionality showed greater activation to the dimension on which they were trained. These results show that dogs do not automatically generalize between two- and three-dimensional stimuli and caution against implicit assumptions when using pictures or videos with dogs.Competing Interest StatementG.B. & M.S. own equity in Dog Star Technologies and developed technology used in some of the research described in this paper. The terms of this arrangement have been reviewed and approved by Emory University in accordance with its conflict of interest policies.