Awake fMRI reveals brain regions for novel word detection in dogs

• Authors: Ashley Prichard, Emory University; Peter F. Cook, New College of Florida; Mark Spivak, Comprehensive Pet Therapy; Raveena Chhibber, Emory University; Gregory Berns, Emory University
• Journal Title: Frontiers in Neuroscience
• Volume: Volume 12, Number OCT
• Publisher: Frontiers Media | 2018-10-15
• Type of Work: Article | Final Publisher PDF
• Publisher DOI: http://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00737
• Subjects: Psychology, Cognitive; Language, Linguistics
• Keywords: fMRI; dog; language; novelty; multivoxel pattern analysis

Abstract

Copyright © 2018 Prichard, Cook, Spivak, Chhibber and Berns. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. How do dogs understand human words? At a basic level, understanding would require the discrimination of words from non-words. To determine the mechanisms of such a discrimination, we trained 12 dogs to retrieve two objects based on object names, then probed the neural basis for these auditory discriminations using awake-fMRI. We compared the neural response to these trained words relative to “oddball” pseudowords the dogs had not heard before. Consistent with novelty detection, we found greater activation for pseudowords relative to trained words bilaterally in the parietotemporal cortex. To probe the neural basis for representations of trained words, searchlight multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) revealed that a subset of dogs had clusters of informative voxels that discriminated between the two trained words. These clusters included the left temporal cortex and amygdala, left caudate nucleus, and thalamus. These results demonstrate that dogs' processing of human words utilizes basic processes like novelty detection, and for some dogs, may also include auditory and hedonic representations.