Bálint Anna, Eleőd Huba, Magyari Lilla, Kis Anna, Gácsi Márta
MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, Budapest, Hungary.
Department of Ethology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
R Soc Open Sci. 2022 Apr 6;9(4):211769. doi: 10.1098/rsos.211769. eCollection 2022 Apr.
Recent advances in the field of canine neuro-cognition allow for the non-invasive research of brain mechanisms in family dogs. Considering the striking similarities between dog's and human (infant)'s socio-cognition at the behavioural level, both similarities and differences in neural background can be of particular relevance. The current study investigates brain responses of = 17 family dogs to human and conspecific emotional vocalizations using a fully non-invasive event-related potential (ERP) paradigm. We found that similarly to humans, dogs show a differential ERP response depending on the species of the caller, demonstrated by a more positive ERP response to human vocalizations compared to dog vocalizations in a time window between 250 and 650 ms after stimulus onset. A later time window between 800 and 900 ms also revealed a valence-sensitive ERP response in interaction with the species of the caller. Our results are, to our knowledge, the first ERP evidence to show the species sensitivity of vocal neural processing in dogs along with indications of valence sensitive processes in later post-stimulus time periods.
犬类神经认知领域的最新进展使得对家养宠物狗大脑机制进行非侵入性研究成为可能。考虑到狗与人类（婴儿）在行为层面的社会认知存在显著相似性，神经背景方面的异同可能具有特殊意义。本研究使用完全非侵入性的事件相关电位（ERP）范式，调查了17只家养宠物狗对人类和同种动物情感发声的大脑反应。我们发现，与人类相似，狗根据发声者的物种表现出不同的ERP反应，在刺激开始后250至650毫秒的时间窗口内，与狗的发声相比，对人类发声的ERP反应更积极，这证明了这一点。在800至900毫秒的较晚时间窗口也揭示了与发声者物种相互作用时的效价敏感ERP反应。据我们所知，我们的研究结果是首个ERP证据，表明狗的发声神经处理具有物种敏感性，同时也表明在刺激后较晚时间段存在效价敏感过程。
