Owner's scent lingers on dog's brain like perfume: Study

A new study has revealed that owner's smell lingers in the dog's brain like a perfume and an area of their brain associated with reward responds more strongly to the scents of familiar humans.

The researcher revealed that when a dog was presented with scent samples from itself, an unfamiliar dog, a dog that lived in the subject's household, an unfamiliar human, and a human that lived in the subject's household, all five scents elicited a similar response in parts of the dogs' brains .

Gregory Berns, director of Emory University's Center for Neuropolicy said that in their study the scent donors were not physically present, which suggested that the canine brain responses were being triggered by something distant in space and time, and that their brains have these mental representations of their owners that persist when they are not there.

The study also revealed that caudate responses were significantly stronger for the scents of familiar humans, followed by that of familiar dogs.

Berns said that the stronger caudate activation suggested that not only did the dogs discriminate the familiar human scent from the others, they had a positive association with it and that their "reward response" is reserved for familiar humans.

The study was published in Behavioural Processes.