Domestic dogs as a comparative model for social neuroscience: Advances and challenges

Dogs and humans have lived together for thousands of years and share many analogous socio-cognitive skills. Dog neuroimaging now provides insight into the neural bases of these shared social abilities. Here, we summarize key findings from dog fMRI identifying neocortical brain areas implicated in face, body, and emotion perception and action observation in dogs. These findings provide converging evidence that the temporal cortex plays a significant role in visual social cognition in dogs. We further briefly review investigations into the neural bases of the dog-human relationship, mainly involving limbic brain regions. We then discuss current challenges in the field, such as statistical power and lack of common template spaces, and how to overcome them. Finally, we argue that the foundation has now been built to investigate the neural bases of more complex socio-cognitive phenomena shared by dogs and humans. This will help establish the domestic dog as an even more powerful comparative model species and provide novel insights into the evolutionary roots of social cognition.