August 17, 2016 – Given the choice, many dogs prefer praise from their owners over food, suggests a new study published in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. The study is one of the first to combine brain-imaging data with behavioural experiments to explore canine reward preferences.

“We are trying to understand the basis of the dog-human bond and whether it’s mainly about food, or about the relationship itself,” said Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and lead author of the research. “Out of the 13 dogs that completed the study, we found that most of them either preferred praise from their owners over food, or they appeared to like both equally. Only two of the dogs were real chow hounds, showing a strong preference for the food.”


“One theory about dogs is that they are primarily Pavlovian machines: They just want food and their owners are simply the means to get it,” Berns said. “Another, more current, view of their behavior is that dogs value human contact in and of itself.”


For the current experiment, the researchers began by training the dogs to associate three different objects with different outcomes. A pink toy truck signalled a food reward; a blue toy knight signalled verbal praise from the owner; and a hairbrush signalled no reward, to serve as a control.


All of the dogs showed a stronger neural activation for the reward stimuli compared to the stimulus that signalled no reward, and their responses covered a broad range. Four of the dogs showed a particularly strong activation for the stimulus that signalled praise from their owners. Nine of the dogs showed similar neural activation for both the praise stimulus and the food stimulus. And two of the dogs consistently showed more activation when shown the stimulus for food.


“We found that the caudate response of each dog in the first experiment correlated with their choices in the second experiment,” Berns said. “Dogs are individuals and their neurological profiles fit the behavioural choices they make. Most of the dogs alternated between food and owner, but the dogs with the strongest neural response to praise chose to go to their owners 80 to 90 percent of the time. It shows the importance of social reward and praise to dogs. It may be analogous to how we humans feel when someone praises us.”


“Dogs are hyper-social with humans,” Berns said, “and their integration into human ecology makes dogs a unique model for studying cross-species social bonding.”

Photo: Gregory Berns, Emory University. Most of the dogs in the experiments preferred praise over food, or liked them both equally. Kady, a Labrador-golden retriever mix, was the top dog when it came to the strength of her preference for praise.

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