What does your dog love more: your smiling
face or a fresh bowl of processed meat goo?
A new study from Emory University suggests
that praise more than pulls its weight against
Kibbles and Bits.
Pavlov's dog casts a long shadow over human/dog
interaction.
Your bond with scruffy might be tender.
It might be the defining relationship of your
life.
But when you watch him hoover up dog chow
-- or, let's face it, worse things -- it's
easy to see him as little more than a Pavlovian
beast, his entire nature warped around the
acquisition and consumption of food.
Neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his Emory
Dog Project team decided to look inside the
dog brain for answers, which is to say they
took 13 fMRI-trained dogs and taught them
to associate three different objects with
three different outcomes.
A pink truck?
That's a food reward, buddy.
A blue toy knight?
Verbal praise from your owner!
And a hairbrush?
Sorry, that doesn't get you anything.
The researchers tested all three objects on
the dogs in an fMRI for close to 100 trails,
then they sat back and observed the neural
fireworks.
To no one's surprise, the reward stimuli -- the
truck and the knight -- resulted in stronger
neural activation than the hairbrush.
Four of the dogs preferred the praise-stimuli
objects, two preferred the food-stimuli object
and the nine showed similar activation for
both.
They followed this up with a y-shaped maze,
one branch leading to food,
the other to the dog's owner.
The dog's behavioral choice at the crossroads
matched up closely
with their observed neural activity.
Most of the dogs were willing to go either
way, but the praise-centric dogs from the
first experiment went to their owners 80-90
percent of the time.
Though
the degree of preference can be highly variable
on a dog-to-dog level.
Future studies may reveal how breed, rearing,
and genetic profile play into the situation,
as well further illuminate the evolution of
the domestic dog.
So how does this match up with YOUR human/dog
relationships?
Let us know.
And if you crave more scientific insight into
your daily life, be sure to visit now.howstuffworks.com
each and every day.
