Annotated Bib. Brain Regions

Desmet C, van der Wiel A, Brass M (2017) Brain regions involved in observing and trying to interpret dog behaviour. PLoS ONE 12(9): e0182721.

Desmet, van der Wiel, and Brass research the human brain regions that are involved in mentalizing animal behavior. Their goal of their work is to find out if the same brain regions that are involved in mentalizing human behaviors are the same regions “engaged when observing dog behavior” (1). The idea of this research stems from the prior extensive research of the brain correlations of mentalizing human to human interaction. The study focuses on three major questions: does the strength of brain activation vary with observations that are easy versus difficult to interpret; if there is a potential difference, is it amplified when instructed to reason with dog versus passive observation; does the human’s prior experience with dogs effect the activation pattern? In order to go about their research, the authors gathered data from 17 total participants, 8 of them were dog owners and 9 of the participants did not have a dog. The data collected were the brain scans during passive task, interpretation task, and localizer task. The author’s concluded that there are indeed regions of the brain that are more responsive to dog behavior that is difficult to interpret compared to behavior that is easy to interpret. In addition, they concluded that dog ownerships did not “yield a statistically robust influence on the involvement of the mentalizing system when observing dog behavior” (12).