This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When we tell a dog "no" and it resists temptation, what happens in its brain? New research from the Department of Ethology at ELTE and the HUN-REN Research Centre of Natural Sciences suggests that dogs may do more than respond automatically: When they restrain their behavior, their brains show a pattern of activity resembling the human neural signature of self-control.
The study is published in the journal Animal Cognition. Survival and adaptation are not only about what we do, but our ability to stop ourselves at any given moment can be almost as important. Think of a mouse that stops moving when a predator is nearby or a human who successfully gives up smoking after years of damaging their own health.
These examples illustrate that the capacity to stop a behavior or resist a temptation can be mediated by different mechanisms. The mouse's freezing response is ancient and automatic, whereas a human who gives up smoking must invoke conscious effort and willpower. In humans, this kind of self-control relies on the youngest part of the brain's self-control system—the frontal lobes.
When neural activity is measured with electroencephalography (EEG), their involvement is reflected in increased frontal theta waves. What happens in dogs' brains when their owners command them to stop and restrain themselves? Dogs can learn not to grab things within reach even when they are interesting or to their taste.
But do their brains solve this problem automatically or deliberately? Researchers from Budapest, Hungary, decided to tackle this question using awake, noninvasive EEG measurements. "We measured 226 short EEG recordings, each around half a minute long, from 14 dogs who, for the duration of a recording, were either obeying a command or idle," explains Iotchev from the HUN-REN Research Centre of Natural Sciences.
"These data were then analyzed to see whether, within and across dogs, theta waves are more pronounced in recordings in which the animals were obeying the restraint command. The absence of such an effect would have left open the possibility that dogs obey commands automatically, but what we observed does not align with this interpretation—during self-control situations, we instead observed EEG activity that resembles human theta in both frequency and localization." The study was conducted under the supervision of Anna Kis and Márta Gácsi, who have investigated for many years how dogs could help us understand human conditions like ADHD or obesity. "Dogs live and age faster than humans but move in the same environments and adapt to the same social and physical challenges," Gácsi explains.
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