Until recently, scientists could only speculate why dogs that have the right personality for a career in threat detection respond to training with such extreme drive.
Since the inception of the Canine Performance Sciences Program, Auburn University's dog trainers have known that these dogs must be continually rewarded, primarily through toys and verbal encouragement, when they have given an alert they have found a target odor. Until recently, however, the scientists could only speculate on the brain activity behind the dogs' fervent response.
That picture is becoming clearer through a neuroscience project financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In the study, Gopikrishna Deshpande, Paul Waggoner and their colleagues are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) recordings to better understand what happens in a dog's brain when the animal is presented with odors and with photographs and videos of human faces.
Auburn is one of only a handful of sites studying fully awake, unrestrained animals with MRI, largely because it takes months of painstaking training to get the dogs to lie with the stillness the machines require.
Deshpande said early data suggest that dogs presented with a learned odor show increased activity in two brain areas: the hippocampus, where memories are stored, and the caudate nucleus, which is associated with rewarding feelings.
"Say you eat something good, or buy something that makes you feel good," he said. "That part of the brain will show blood flow."
They are also focusing on the dog brain's "default mode" network. The more integrated the network is with the rest of the brain, the higher the likelihood of "referential thinking," a foundation necessary for sophisticated emotional states, such as empathy.
Although the research is in its early stages, Waggoner said it could help them identify which dogs will succeed in detection roles and which will thrive as assistance animals -- very different jobs.
ActiveStyle on 08/03/2015