Psychology Department, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Comprehensive Pet Therapy, Inc., Sandy Springs, Georgia, USA.
J Comp Neurol. 2021 Aug 1;529(11):2987-2994. doi: 10.1002/cne.25142. Epub 2021 Mar 25.
The perception and representation of objects in the world are foundational to all animals. The relative importance of objects' physical properties versus how the objects are interacted with continues to be debated. Neural evidence in humans and nonhuman primates suggests animate-inanimate and face-body dimensions of objects are represented in the temporal cortex. However, because primates have opposable thumbs and interact with objects in similar ways, the question remains as to whether this similarity represents the evolution of a common cognitive process or whether it reflects a similarity of physical interaction. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in dogs to test whether the type of interaction affects object processing in an animal that interacts primarily with its mouth. In Study 1, we identified object-processing regions of cortex by having dogs passively view movies of faces and objects. In Study 2, dogs were trained to interact with two new objects with either the mouth or the paw. Then, we measured responsivity in the object regions to the presentation of these objects. Mouth-objects elicited significantly greater activity in object regions than paw-objects. Mouth-objects were also associated with activity in somatosensory cortex, suggesting dogs were anticipating mouthing interactions. These findings suggest that object perception in dogs is affected by how dogs expect to interact with familiar objects.
对世界上的物体的感知和表现是所有动物的基础。物体的物理属性与物体如何相互作用的相对重要性仍在争论中。人类和非人类灵长类动物的神经证据表明，物体的有生命无生命和脸身体维度在颞叶皮层中得到表示。然而，由于灵长类动物有可对向的拇指并且以相似的方式与物体相互作用，因此仍然存在一个问题，即这种相似性是否代表了共同认知过程的进化，或者是否反映了物理相互作用的相似性。在这里，我们使用功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）在狗中进行测试，以检验互动类型是否会影响主要通过嘴巴与物体互动的动物的物体处理。在研究 1 中，我们通过让狗被动观看人脸和物体的电影来确定大脑皮层的物体处理区域。在研究 2 中，狗被训练用嘴或爪子与两个新物体进行互动。然后，我们测量了这些物体呈现时这些物体区域的反应性。与爪子物体相比，嘴巴物体在物体区域中引起的活动明显更大。嘴巴物体也与躯体感觉皮层的活动有关，这表明狗在预期口部互动。这些发现表明，狗的物体感知受到狗对熟悉物体的预期互动方式的影响。
