The workings of a dog's mind

• Autores: Chris Baraniuk
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3172, 2018, pág. 12
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Scientists can now work out what a dog is looking at, just by examining a scan of its brain. Laura Veronica Cuaya at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and her colleagues have studied how dogs do it. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of four border collies, who were trained to sit still in the scanner. The dogs were shown four facial expressions--happy, sad, angry or fearful--made by humans they didn't know, and the fMRI recorded their brain activity. By looking at patterns of activity across the whole brain, the team could tell what facial expression each dog had seen. A computer algorithm found small sites of activity--clusters of firing neurons--that appeared in certain locations, depending on what human emotion the dogs had seen. It was therefore possible to predict what emotion the dogs had seen just by looking at this brain activity.