PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Raúl Hernández-Pérez
AU  - Luis Concha
AU  - Laura V. Cuaya
TI  - Decoding Human Emotional Faces in the Dog’s Brain
AID  - 10.1101/134080
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 134080
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/24/134080.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/24/134080.full
AB  - 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.