Dogs have same sound centres in brain as humans

A new study has found that dogs have dedicated voice areas in their brains, just as people do.

The findings suggest that voice areas evolved at least 100 million years ago, the age of the last common ancestor of humans and dogs, the researchers say.

Attila Andics of MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group in Hungary, said that dogs and humans share a similar social environment, asserting that their findings suggest that they also use similar brain mechanisms to process social information.

He said that this may support the successfulness of vocal communication between the two species.

Andics and his colleagues trained 11 dogs to lay motionless in an fMRI brain scanner. That made it possible to run the same neuroimaging experiment on both dog and human participants-something that had never been done before.

They captured both dogs' and humans' brain activities while the subjects listened to nearly 200 dog and human sounds, ranging from whining or crying to playful barking or laughing.

The images show that dog and human brains include voice areas in similar locations. Not surprisingly, the voice area of dogs responds more strongly to other dogs while that of humans responds more strongly to other humans.

The researchers also noted striking similarities in the ways the dog and human brains process emotionally loaded sounds.

In both species, an area near the primary auditory cortex lit up more with happy sounds than unhappy ones.

The study has been published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.