Put cute dogs in your MRIwatching their brains while they are on the computer TheyIt might seem like a fun way to have a good time watching home movies. It can also be educational.
This is what a team of scientists did using Machine learningIt was possible to understand the visual processing that takes place in the brains of two pooches. They found a remarkable difference between human and canine perception. Dogs are much more sensitive to the actions of other animals than their owners.
This could be a crucial piece of the canine cognition puzzle. It reveals how dogs’ brains prioritize vision.
“Our work is based only on two dogs but proves that these methods can be applied to other canines, even though it’s only two dogs.” says neuroscientist Erin PhillipsEmory University was then known as Emory University. Now, Princeton is home to him.
“I hope that this paper will help pave the way to other researchers to use these methods on dogs as well as other species so we can gain more data and greater insights into the brains of different animals.”
Phillips stated that the research was performed on Daisy and Bhubo dogs. The team had three videos of dog-specific content that lasted 30 minutes. They used a gimbal to film the videos and a selfiestick. The videos included dogs running and humans giving dogs treats or pet toys. Other activities included people interacting with one another, vehicles passing, cats in houses, and dogs walking on leashes.
Each of Daisy and Bhubo watched the movies for 30 minutes each, for a total time of 90 minutes. They also relaxed unrestrained in an FMRI machine. Gregory Berns, a psychologist who was the first person to obtain an MRI of a fully-awake, unrestrained dog, achieved this remarkable feat a decade ago.
Researchers were also able scan the brains Daisy and Bhubo while they sat awake, alert, comfortable in the machine and watched home movies made just for them. It sounds pretty good.
“They didn’t even require treats.” Phillips. “It was funny because it’s serious science and a lot effort went into it, however, it came down to these canines watching videos of other dogs or humans acting silly.”
The video data was separated by timestamps to identify classifiers, such as animals (such dogs, humans, vehicles or other animals), or actions (such sniffing, eating or playing). This data, along with the brain activity of the dogs, was fed into a neural net called Ivis. It was used to map brain activity to the classifiers.
Two people also watched the videos during an MRI. Ivis was also provided with that data.
The AI was able map the brain data of humans to classifiers with 99 per cent accuracy for object and action classifiers. Ivis was a bit less confident with the dogs. The object classifiers didn’t get it right. For the actions, however, AI maps the brain activity to the visual with accuracy between 75 and 88%.
“Humans are extremely object-oriented,” Berns. “There are 10x more nouns than there are verbs within the English language, because of our particular obsession with naming things. Dogs seem to be more interested in the action than they are about who or what they see.
He said that dogs perceive the world differently to humans than humans. Dogs can only discern shades from what we would perceive as the blue and yellow portions of the spectrum. However, they have more motion-sensitive vision receptors.
This could be because dogs have to be more aware about threats in the environment than humans. It could also be due to dogs relying on other senses or both. Humans can be very visual, but dogs are more focused on their olfactory sense. Dogs have a larger percentage of their brain dedicated to processing this information.
Although mapping brain activity to olfactory information is a more difficult experiment to design, it can be very informative. It could also be used to conduct further, more in-depth research on the vision perception of dogs and other animals in the future.
“We demonstrated that it was possible to monitor the brain activity of a dog while it watches a video, and reconstruct what it is seeing.” Berns. “The fact that that we are able is incredible.”
The publication of the research was published in Journal of Visualized Experiments.
