
Attila AndicsEötvös Loránd University · Department of Ethology
Attila Andics
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45
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Publications (45)
Most studies on dogs’ olfactory performance focused only on some individuals pre-trained for a task or on specially selected/trained detection dogs. Here, using the Natural Detection Task (NDT) that does not require training, we assessed the effect of several potential factors on the performance of a large sample of dogs (N = 527/tested, 484/analys...
Dogs exhibit human-analogue attachment to their owners, with similar function and mechanisms to that of infant-mother bond, but its origin is unclear. Comparative studies on socialised wolves and dogs emphasise genetic influence in dogs' preparedness for attachment to humans. We aimed to reveal if this genetic effect stems from general domesticatio...
Research into dogs' olfactory ability is growing rapidly. However, generalising based on scientific results is challenging, because research has been typically conducted on a few specially trained subjects of a few breeds tested in different environmental conditions. We investigated the effects of temperature and humidity (outdoors), age, test loca...
We have investigated dogs’ (Canis familiaris) abilities in associating different sounds with appetitive stimuli of different incentive values. The association’s establishment was first tested on family dogs (n = 20) in a problem-solving behavioural paradigm (experiment 1), then in a problem-solving behavioural paradigm as well as an fMRI study on s...
When addressing preverbal infants and family dogs, people tend to use specific speech styles. While recent studies suggest acoustic parallels between infant- and dog-directed speech, it is unclear whether dogs, like infants, show enhanced neural sensitivity to prosodic aspects of speech directed to them. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging...
Since the dawn of comparative cognitive research, dogs were suspected to possess some capacity for responding to human spoken language. Neuroimaging studies have supported the existence of relevant mechanisms, but convincing behavioral performance is rare, with only few exceptional dogs worldwide demonstrating a lexicon of object-labels they respon...
Domestication dramatically changes behaviour, including communication, as seen in the case of dogs (Canis familiaris) and wolves (Canis lupus). We tested the hypothesis that domestication may affect an ancient, shared communication form of canids, the howling which seems to have higher individual variation in dogs: the perception and usage of howls...
Sine-wave f0 fMRI Dog Human a b s t r a c t Voice-sensitivity in the auditory cortex of a range of mammals has been proposed to be determined primarily by tuning to conspecific auditory stimuli, but recent human findings indicate a role for a more general tuning to voicelikeness. Vocal emotional valence, a central characteristic of vocalisations, h...
fMRI provides a window into brain function by localizing task‐related neural activity. Its comparative applica‐ tion allows the tracking of evolutionary changes in the brain. To study voice and speech perception, the dog is an excellent model, because of its shared social environment with and evolutionary distance from humans. Non‐invasive, awake d...
Speech carries identity-diagnostic acoustic cues that help individuals recognize each other during vocal–social interactions. In humans, fundamental frequency, formant dispersion and harmonics-to-noise ratio serve as characteristics along which speakers can be reliably separated. The ability to infer a speaker’s identity is also adaptive for member...
Family dogs are exposed to a continuous flow of human speech throughout their lives. However, the extent of their abilities in speech perception is unknown. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test speech detection and language representation in the dog brain. Dogs (n = 18) listened to natural speech and scrambled speech i...
To learn words, humans extract statistical regularities from speech. Multiple species use statistical learning also to process speech, but the neural underpinnings of speech segmentation in non-humans remain largely unknown. Here, we investigated computational and neural markers of speech segmentation in dogs, a phylogenetically distant mammal that...
In humans, social relationship with the speaker affects neural processing of speech, as exemplified by children's auditory and reward responses to their mother's utterances. Family dogs show human analogue attachment behavior towards the owner, and neuroimaging revealed auditory cortex and reward center sensitivity to verbal praises in dog brains....
Learning object names after few exposures, is thought to be a typically human capacity. Previous accounts of similar skills in dogs did not include control testing procedures, leaving unanswered the question whether this ability is uniquely human. To investigate the presence of the capacity to rapidly learn words in dogs, we tested object-name lear...
Language familiarization in dog brain
Conspecific-preference in social perception is evident for multiple sensory modalities and in many species. There is also a dedicated neural network for face processing in primates. Yet, the evolutionary origin and the relative role of neural species-sensitivity and face-sensitivity in visuo-social processing are largely unknown. In this comparativ...
Background:
Recent studies suggest that clinically sound ventriculomegaly in dogs could be a preliminary form of the clinically significant hydrocephalus. We evaluated changes of ventricular volumes in awake functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) trained dogs with indirectly assessed cognitive abilities over time (thus avoiding the use of an...
The dog rhinarium (naked and often moist skin on the nose-tip) is prominent and richly innervated, suggesting a sensory function. Compared to nose-tips of herbivorous artio- and perissodactyla, carnivoran rhinaria are considerably colder. We hypothesized that this coldness makes the dog rhinarium particularly sensitive to radiating heat. We trained...
Previous research proves dogs’ outstanding success in socio-communicative interactions with humans; however, little is known about other domestic species’ interspecific skills when kept as companion animals. Our aim was to assess highly socialized young miniature pigs’ spontaneous reactions in interactions with humans in direct comparison with that...
Resting-state networks are spatially distributed, functionally connected brain regions. Studying these networks gives us information about the large-scale functional organization of the brain and alternations in these networks are considered to play a role in a wide range of neurological conditions and aging. To describe resting-state networks in d...
Conspecific individual recognition using vocal cues has been shown in
a wide range of species but there is no published evidence that dogs are able to recognize their owner based on his/her voice alone (interspecific individual recognition). In our test, dogs had to rely on vocal cues to find their hidden owner in a two-way choice task. From behind...
Background and aims:
Dogs have recently become an important model species for comparative social and cognitive neuroscience. Brain template-related label maps are essential for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis, to localize neural responses. In this study, we present a detailed, individual-based, T1-weighted MRI-based brai...
The past decades have seen an explosion of research into the psychological, cognitive, neural, biological, and technical mechanisms of voice perception. These mechanisms refer to the general ability to extract information from voices expressed by other living beings or by technical systems. Voice perception research is now a lively area of research...
Resting-state networks are spatially distributed, functionally connected brain regions. Studying these networks gives us information about the large-scale functional organization of the brain and alternations in these networks are considered to play a role in a wide range of neurological conditions and aging. To describe resting-state networks in d...
Resting-state networks (RSNs) are spatially distributed, functionally connected brain regions, characterized by the correlation of the time series of spontaneous, low frequency fluctuations of the blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal. Studying these networks gives us information about the large-scale functional organization of the brain and a...
In this review we focus on the exciting new opportunities in comparative neuroscience to study neural processes of vocal social perception by comparing dog and human neural activity using fMRI methods. The dog is a relatively new addition to this research area; however, it has a large potential to become a standard species in such investigations. A...
There is an ongoing need to improve animal models for investigating human behavior and its biological underpinnings. The domestic dog (Canis familiaris) is a promising model in cognitive neuroscience. However, before it can contribute to advances in this field in a comparative, reliable, and valid manner, several methodological issues warrant atten...
During speech processing, human listeners can separately analyze lexical and intonational cues to arrive at a unified representation of communicative content. The evolution of this capacity can be best investigated by comparative studies. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored whether and how dog brains segregate and integrate lex...
During the approximately 18–32 thousand years of domestication [1], dogs and humans have shared a similar social environment [2]. Dog and human vocalizations are thus familiar and relevant to both species [3], although they belong to evolutionarily distant taxa, as their lineages split approximately 90–100 million years ago [4]. In this first compa...
Humans excel at assessing conspecific emotional valence and intensity, based solely on non-verbal vocal bursts that are also common in other mammals. It is not known, however, whether human listeners rely on similar acoustic cues to assess emotional content in conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations, and which acoustical parameters affect thei...
Events of putting things in places, and removing them from places, are fundamental activities of human experience. But do speakers of different languages construe such events in the same way when describing them? This volume investigates placement and removal event descriptions from 18 areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages. Each...
Amblyopia is a visual disorder caused by an anomalous early visual experience. It has been suggested that suppression of the visual input from the weaker eye might be a primary underlying mechanism of the amblyopic syndrome. However, it is still an unresolved question to what extent neural responses to the visual information coming from the amblyop...
We investigated neural mechanisms that support voice recognition in a training paradigm with fMRI. The same listeners were trained on different weeks to categorize the mid-regions of voice-morph continua as an individual's voice. Stimuli implicitly defined a voice-acoustics space, and training explicitly defined a voice-identity space. The pre-defi...
Voices in the auditory modality, like faces in the visual modality, are the keys to person recognition. This fMRI experiment investigated the neural organisation of voice categories using a voice-training paradigm. Voice-morph continua were created between two female Hungarian speakers' voices saying six monosyllabic Hungarian words, one continuum...
We present results from an experiment which shows that voice perception is influenced by the phonetic content of speech. Dutch listeners were presented with thirteen speakers pronouncing CVC words with systematically varying segmental content, and they had to discriminate the speakers' voices. Results show that certain segments help listeners discr...
Listeners performed speeded two-alternative choice between two unfamiliar and relatively similar voices or between two phonetically close segments, in VC syllables. For each decision type (segment, voice), the non-target dimension (voice, segment) either was constant, or varied across four alternatives. Responses were always slower when a non-targe...