Dogs Do This One Thing That Makes Them Very Similar To Humans
A new study has found that an innate ability in dogs and humans developed before our evolutionary paths diverged nearly 100 million years ago.
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00:00Numerosity.
00:04In human psychology, it's a sensitivity to numbers, like being able to tell the difference
00:08between a couple of objects and many.
00:10But now researchers from Emory University have found that man's best friend may also
00:14have this skill, and they use the same part of their brains to employ it as we do.
00:18The team of researchers trained 11 dogs to sit completely still in an fMRI machine while
00:22they scanned their brains while showing them a series of dots, observing how their brains
00:26reacted when the dogs alternated position and quantity.
00:29And the researchers found that a region of the dogs' brains lit up more intensely when
00:32the quantity changed, just like humans and apes.
00:35And it was the same parietotemporal region, which the researchers say could mean that
00:39numerosity developed before man and man's best friend diverged in our evolutionary paths
00:4490 to 100 million years ago.
00:46The researchers said about the discovery,
00:48Our findings suggest that the ability to represent numerosity and the mechanisms supporting this
00:53system are deeply conserved over evolutionary time.
00:55Perhaps owing to a role in foraging or predation.