Dogs have 'voice areas' in brain

BUDAPEST: Researchers in Hungary say they have found the first evidence of human-like "voice areas" in the brains of dogs, which could help explain why they became "man's best friend."
Previously it was thought that only primates were sensitive to acoustic cues of emotion.
The findings suggest one reason why dogs are good at tuning into the feelings of humans, with whom they have been allied for tens of thousands of years.
"Dogs and humans share a similar social environment," said Attila Andics of the MTA-ELTE comparative ethology research group in Budapest.
"Our findings suggest that they also use similar brain mechanisms to process social information. This may support the successfulness of vocal communication between the two species" during the approximately 18,000 to 32,000 years of canine domestication.
The discovery was published in the current issue of the US journal Current Biology.
According to the researchers, the voice areas could have a longer evolutionary history than previously proposed, dating back to the common ancestor of dogs and humans some 100 million years ago, "although convergent evolution cannot be excluded."
In what they say was the first experiment of its kind, Andics and his colleagues did fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans on 11 dogs and 22 humans, recording brain activities while the subjects listened to nearly 200 dog and human sounds, ranging from whining or crying to playful barking or laughing, along with nonvocal sounds.
The researchers said the images showed that dog and human brains included voice areas in similar locations, and that an area near the primary auditory cortex in both species lit up more with happy sounds than unhappy ones.
Not surprisingly, dogs' voice areas responded more strongly to dog sounds, while those of humans responded more strongly to other humans.
"At last we begin to understand how our best friend is looking at us and navigating in our social environment," Andics said. – DPA