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Tracing abstract action representations in the dog brain
Poster Session A, Wednesday, September 30, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Dorottya Szilvia Rácz1,2,3, Ágoston Beke1, Márta Gácsi4,5, Marianna Boros1, Attila Andics1,4; 1Neuroethology of Communication Lab, Department of Ethology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, 2Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, 3Doctoral School of Biology, Institute of Biology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, 4ELTE NAP Canine Brain Research Group, Budapest, Hungary, 5HUN-REN-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, Budapest, Hungary
In humans, words are grounded in discrete conceptual representations, while language itself also facilitates the formation of abstract representations. Although humans are the only species with language, the potential for abstract mental representations has been indicated in a few nonhuman species; however, it is less known to what extent the complexity and structure of such representations resemble human, language-supported abstraction. Family dogs possess complex social-cognitive skills similar to those of humans, which are thought to play an important role in structuring the world into discrete concepts, as well as they have been immersed in the human social-linguistic niche for thousands of years and on a daily basis. Together, these suggest that dogs may be capable of forming abstract mental representations, even ones that closely resemble those of humans, despite their evolutionary distance. Dogs rapidly learn action labels, and process not only the auditory word form of action instructions but the meaning as well. The abstractness of action and action word representations, however, has never been investigated in dogs. As action representations in humans are considered abstract if they are independent of (1) modality (spoken/written labels vs. observing the action), (2) viewpoint, and (3) agent identity, here we test these three aspects of dogs’ action representations. We present awake, unrestrained family dogs (planned sample size: N = 20) with short video clips of actions (jump, turn) performed by both humans and dogs (2-2 unfamiliar individuals) recorded from different angles (frontal, lateral); and with spoken words of the same actions (recorded from the owner and unfamiliar humans) while measuring their brain activities using fMRI. We predict that if dogs possess (1) modality-independent action representations, then representational similarity analyses (RSA) will reveal similar encoding of spoken labels referring to an action and videos of that action, in associative regions of the dog brain. Furthermore, if dogs’ action representations are independent of (2) the viewpoint and of (3) the species acting, then the same actions performed by humans and other dogs, and presented from different perspectives, should also be encoded similarly in the dog brain. Together, these findings would provide evidence that human-like abstract mental representations can emerge even in an evolutionary distant species which possesses complex social-cognitive skills, and is addressed by speech on a daily basis.
Topic Areas: Animal Communication and Comparative/Evolutionary Studies, Meaning: Lexical Semantics