Do dogs recognise emotions in photos of humans?

Nearly 150 years ago, Charles Darwin sent photographs of actors expressing various emotions to missionaries far and wide. He wanted to know whether the natives correctly identified the emotions expressed in European faces.

Now, 150 years later, Italian veterinary scientists working on animal behaviour and bioethics asked the same question, with a variation: do dogs recognise anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and disgust as well emotionally neutral faces when they see photographs?

By Rcramer1413 via Wikimedia Commons

Seems they do. And what’s more, they turn their head towards right (for left hemisphere processing) when they see surprise expressed in a photograph – whereas they turn to their right (for right hemisphere processing) when the photograph expresses other emotions.

Why?

I am not sure about the reasons they give. It appears that it could be a misinterpretation by dogs. Smiling without vocalisation that signal happiness is often mistaken by dogs as snarling too, they say. Do you think they are right? Take a look at the paper published online in Learning & Behavior  -Orienting asymmetries and physiological reactivity in dogs’ response to human emotional faces



Anyway, do you respond to the pictures above left, and here right, differently? (It is the same picture, but flipped horizontally).

Which one do you emotionally respond to, as a dog lover? The picture on the left or the one on the right?

Learning & Behavior https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-018-0325-2

How Many Connections does a Neuron Make in the Brain?

You may find estimates in many neurobiology text books. But has anybody really counted them?

Not really. Estimates are estimates.

But now there is a technique to actually count the number of connections. There is a paper in a recent issue of Nature, that spells out a technique. Whole brain fluorescence-based axonal tracing and high throughput DNA sequencing of genetically barcoded neurons.

The scientists, some of them with unpronounceable names, have delineated the projection patterns of 591 individual neurons in the mouse primary visual cortex using the technique.

Nature 556: 51–56 (05 April 2018), doi:10.1038/nature26159

Some time ago, when I saw a paper that achieved single cell RNA sequencing to come to the conclusion that there are 11 distinct neuronal populations in the dorsal root of the spinal chord, I knew something like this is bound to happen.

Like the Genome project, this is going to throw up such large amounts of data that it will keep the computer programmers busy for some time. And it will take even more time to make some reasonable sense of the data. But this is indeed, a historical beginning. It is even more exciting than the earlier techniques that gave this image by removing all the fats from the brain leaving a protein skeleton:

Image by Thomas Schultz