title: Voice-sensitive regions in the dog and human brain are revealed by comparative fMRI.
abstract: During the approximately 18-32 thousand years of domestication, dogs and humans have shared a similar social environment. Dog and human vocalizations are thus familiar and relevant to both species, although they belong to evolutionarily distant taxa, as their lineages split approximately 90-100 million years ago. In this first comparative neuroimaging study of a nonprimate and a primate species, we made use of this special combination of shared environment and evolutionary distance. We presented dogs and humans with the same set of vocal and nonvocal stimuli to search for functionally analogous voice-sensitive cortical regions. We demonstrate that voice areas exist in dogs and that they show a similar pattern to anterior temporal voice areas in humans. Our findings also reveal that sensitivity to vocal emotional valence cues engages similarly located nonprimary auditory regions in dogs and humans. Although parallel evolution cannot be excluded, our findings suggest that voice areas may have a more ancient evolutionary origin than previously known.
authors.affiliation: MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C, 1117 Budapest, Hungary. Electronic address: attila.andics@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Attila
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Andics
authors.affiliation: MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C, 1117 Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Márta
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gácsi
authors.affiliation: MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C, 1117 Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Tamás
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Faragó
authors.affiliation: Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C, 1117 Budapest, Hungary; Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Magyar tudósok körútja 2, 1117 Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kis
authors.affiliation: MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C, 1117 Budapest, Hungary; Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C, 1117 Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Adám
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Miklósi
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000818:Animals; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004285:Dogs; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D033281:Nontherapeutic Human Experimentation; D013702:Temporal Lobe; D014828:Vocalization, Animal; D014831:Voice