EMPATHY
TEST
In a brightly lit lab in Kell Hall, doctoral student Olivia Tomeo kneels on the floor, places her hand flat on a small yellow X taped to the ground and raises a rubber mallet high above her head. Her human audience — watching a live video stream in a room next door — straighten up in our chairs in anticipation.
“How do you think she’ll react?” asks Erin Hecht, a research scientist in the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Georgia State and the lead researcher in a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that’s investigating dog behavior.
The “she” is Babu, my rescued Chihuahua-mix who’s sniffing around the lab, and Hecht wonders what she’ll do when Tomeo pretends to smash her own hand.
I tell Hecht I’ll bet her 10 bucks that Babu, whom my wife discovered in our front yard one winter night so withered she must’ve slipped through the pickets in our fence, will rush to Tomeo’s side and lick her faux injury back to health seconds after she swings the mallet. Surely, Babu will show some concern for a member of the species that nursed her back to health and provided her the lifestyle of a tiny, canine queen. She loves her human family after all ... or does she?
When the hammer falls and Tomeo wails in fake agony, Babu casually walks by her, taking just a second or two to investigate, and sits down in the corner of the room.
“We see a lot of variation here,” Hecht says, laughing, as I reach for my wallet.
Assessing Babu’s compassion toward humans, this is the third in a battery of behavioral tests that gather doggy data to explore how the differences in canine brains might explain the differences in their behavior.
Hecht leads a multi-institutional team in the project. The researchers are using the behavioral tests and dog owner surveys, as well as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans and genetic samples of Canis lupus familiaris, to investigate what makes up a dog’s personality, and how, over thousands of years of breeding, dogs’ abilities have evolved.
For instance, why does a border collie herd? What is it about a beagle’s brain that makes it so good at following scents? Are golden retrievers always dopey and lovable (It turns out they have a pocket of air in the front of their skulls, Hecht says.) Or is it some combination of breed and life experiences? And how do these behaviors and temperaments mix in mutts?
“I’m especially interested in the specialized behaviors we’ve bred dogs to do, like herding or hunting — they’re all learned behaviors,” Hecht says. “But there’s something in a dog’s brain that makes the predisposition to learn these behaviors innate.”
Hecht’s research is exploring the boundary between instinctual and learned behavior.
“It relates directly to humans,” Hecht says, “because we have cognitive abilities that aren’t really innate, but we’re wired to pick them up quickly without much formal training — language, for instance.”
Man’s best friend, she says, can help us figure out how certain behaviors in complex organisms are expressed.
“To me, this is one of the fundamental questions of neuroscience, and there’s this perfect experiment that’s been walking around our homes for thousands of years,” she says.
EMPATHY
TEST
In a brightly lit lab in Kell Hall, doctoral student Olivia Tomeo kneels on the floor, places her hand flat on a small yellow X taped to the ground and raises a rubber mallet high above her head. Her human audience — watching a live video stream in a room next door — straighten up in our chairs in anticipation.
“How do you think she’ll react?” asks Erin Hecht, a research scientist in the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Georgia State and the lead researcher in a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that’s investigating dog behavior.
The “she” is Babu, my rescued Chihuahua-mix who’s sniffing around the lab, and Hecht wonders what she’ll do when Tomeo pretends to smash her own hand.
I tell Hecht I’ll bet her 10 bucks that Babu, whom my wife discovered in our front yard one winter night so withered she must’ve slipped through the pickets in our fence, will rush to Tomeo’s side and lick her faux injury back to health seconds after she swings the mallet. Surely, Babu will show some concern for a member of the species that nursed her back to health and provided her the lifestyle of a tiny, canine queen. She loves her human family after all ... or does she?
When the hammer falls and Tomeo wails in fake agony, Babu casually walks by her, taking just a second or two to investigate, and sits down in the corner of the room.
“We see a lot of variation here,” Hecht says, laughing, as I reach for my wallet.
Assessing Babu’s compassion toward humans, this is the third in a battery of behavioral tests that gather doggy data to explore how the differences in canine brains might explain the differences in their behavior.
Hecht leads a multi-institutional team in the project. The researchers are using the behavioral tests and dog owner surveys, as well as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans and genetic samples of Canis lupus familiaris, to investigate what makes up a dog’s personality, and how, over thousands of years of breeding, dogs’ abilities have evolved.
For instance, why does a border collie herd? What is it about a beagle’s brain that makes it so good at following scents? Are golden retrievers always dopey and lovable (It turns out they have a pocket of air in the front of their skulls, Hecht says.) Or is it some combination of breed and life experiences? And how do these behaviors and temperaments mix in mutts?
“I’m especially interested in the specialized behaviors we’ve bred dogs to do, like herding or hunting — they’re all learned behaviors,” Hecht says. “But there’s something in a dog’s brain that makes the predisposition to learn these behaviors innate.”
Hecht’s research is exploring the boundary between instinctual and learned behavior.
“It relates directly to humans,” Hecht says, “because we have cognitive abilities that aren’t really innate, but we’re wired to pick them up quickly without much formal training — language, for instance.”
Man’s best friend, she says, can help us figure out how certain behaviors in complex organisms are expressed.
“To me, this is one of the fundamental questions of neuroscience, and there’s this perfect experiment that’s been walking around our homes for thousands of years,” she says.
Hecht’s research follows up on one of the most significant experiments tracing the evolutionary pathway of domesticated animals.
In Siberia in the 1950s, a Russian geneticist named Dmitry Belyaev selectively bred hundreds of wild silver foxes over several years to recreate how early humans turned wolves into canine companions.
Belyaev selected foxes that were less aggressive toward humans and, after about 10 generations of breeding, had domesticated almost 20 percent of the animals. They showed little fear of humans, wagged their tails and were affectionate. Further, they had floppier ears and curlier tails and experienced other curious physical changes, such as the color of their fur and the shape of their skulls and teeth.
Just as Belyaev selected foxes to breed that expressed a predisposition toward tameness, he also bred another control group of foxes that were less tolerant of humans. These foxes developed even more aggressive behavior.
“We have these two strains of foxes that are separated, in the grand scheme, by only a few generations — 50 [generations] at this point — yet they’re completely different temperamentally,” Hecht says.
Now, almost 60 years later, there’s a large population of domesticated foxes, and the biological experiment continues. The research thrust of Belyaev’s silver foxes is on genetics and behavior, but there has been very little focus on neuroscience, which explores the function of the nervous system and the brain. When Hecht, a neuroscientist whose work combines behavioral tests and the use of neuroimaging techniques, discovered that no one was analyzing the foxes’ brains, she set out to do so herself.
“I wrote to the researchers there and explained why we should care about how their brains are wired,” she says. “And then they sent me some brains to look at.”
Hecht investigated how the foxes’ brains changed because of selective breeding. She expanded the research to include dogs — after all, what other animal has been bred more to suit our desires and needs?
In dogs, there’s tremendous anatomical variability. Babu the Chihuahua’s brain is much smaller than Rusty the golden retriever’s. There are neurological differences in breeds, too, Hecht says, which may explain why certain breeds have a disposition to perform certain jobs. Border collies, for example, will almost innately try to herd sheep when exposed to them, whether or not they’ve ever seen a sheep before.
Anatolian shepherds, similarly, have an almost built-in tendency to guard sheep. But where border collies display predatory behavior toward sheep — they stalk, chase and bark — Anatolian shepherds will treat them as if they’re pack members, submitting to them and even trying to mate with them.
Hecht is hoping to identify neural traits that might predict particular behaviors in dogs.
“For a border collie, perhaps we’ll find a neural circuit that may be associated with herding,” she says. “Or one that might make it a really bad pet.”
Part of Hecht’s NSF-funded research takes place at the University of Georgia and focuses on pure-bred “champion” dogs actively doing the job they were bred to perform, such as German shepherds involved in police work.
“The goal is to determine what differentiates a German shepherd brain from a border collie brain, and what neural differences are tied to the breed-specific skill,” she says.
Hecht and her colleagues are also working with the U.S. Department of Defense’s working dog program at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, where all military working dogs are trained. They’re searching for neural markers associated with symptoms of anxiety, aggression and post-traumatic stress disorder that may be related to training or deployment.
“Initially, we’re looking at the brains of dogs that were euthanized for health reasons that weren’t related to aggression, as well as ones that were uncontrollably aggressive and were a danger to themselves and others,” she says.
Hecht says they’ve found neurological differences between the aggressive and nonaggressive dogs, and they’re beginning a new study to observe the dogs’ brains as they learn highly specialized skills.
“To me, this is one of the fundamental questions of neuroscience, and there’s this perfect experiment that’s been walking around our homes for thousands of years.”
— ERIN HECHT
Hecht investigated how the foxes’ brains changed because of selective breeding. She expanded the research to include dogs — after all, what other animal has been bred more to suit our desires and needs?
In dogs, there’s tremendous anatomical variability. Babu the Chihuahua’s brain is much smaller than Rusty the golden retriever’s. There are neurological differences in breeds, too, Hecht says, which may explain why certain breeds have a disposition to perform certain jobs. Border collies, for example, will almost innately try to herd sheep when exposed to them, whether or not they’ve ever seen a sheep before.
Anatolian shepherds, similarly, have an almost built-in tendency to guard sheep. But where border collies display predatory behavior toward sheep — they stalk, chase and bark — Anatolian shepherds will treat them as if they’re pack members, submitting to them and even trying to mate with them.
Hecht is hoping to identify neural traits that might predict particular behaviors in dogs.
“For a border collie, perhaps we’ll find a neural circuit that may be associated with herding,” she says. “Or one that might make it a really bad pet.”
Part of Hecht’s NSF-funded research takes place at the University of Georgia and focuses on pure-bred “champion” dogs actively doing the job they were bred to perform, such as German shepherds involved in police work.
“The goal is to determine what differentiates a German shepherd brain from a border collie brain, and what neural differences are tied to the breed-specific skill,” she says.
Hecht and her colleagues are also working with the U.S. Department of Defense’s working dog program at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, where all military working dogs are trained. They’re searching for neural markers associated with symptoms of anxiety, aggression and post-traumatic stress disorder that may be related to training or deployment.
“Initially, we’re looking at the brains of dogs that were euthanized for health reasons that weren’t related to aggression, as well as ones that were uncontrollably aggressive and were a danger to themselves and others,” she says.
Hecht says they’ve found neurological differences between the aggressive and nonaggressive dogs, and they’re beginning a new study to observe the dogs’ brains as they learn highly specialized skills.
“To me, this is one of the fundamental questions of neuroscience, and there’s this perfect experiment that’s been walking around our homes for thousands of years.”
— ERIN HECHT
The studies are still in their early stages, Hecht says, and she and her team are working to compile a larger sample size. They’re going to dog parks around Atlanta to interview dog owners and take genetic samples of their pets.
“We’re building a database of behavioral, genetic and survey data to get a better look at what sorts of individual differences exist in dogs,” Tomeo says.
Back in Kell Hall, the researchers shuffle volunteer pooches through the behavioral tests, carefully cataloguing each tail wag and anxious bark.
“In these tests, we’re trying to replicate the experiences dogs have in their daily lives,” Hecht says, “such as meeting a new person, being in a new place, being left alone and, finally, being reunited with its owner.”
For every behavioral test, the owner fills out a survey describing the dog’s behavior at home.
“The behavioral tests allow us to measure the dog’s behavior directly,” Hecht says. “And with the survey and the tests, we can get a read on what the dog is really like.”
Besides the empathy test, the experimenter will point to an object to see if the dog’s eyes follow — a gauge of the dog’s understanding of human gestures. They test the dog’s reaction to a “Bumble Ball,” a motorized, self-propelled kids’ toy (“Some dogs get out of its way, and some try to kill it,” Hecht says) and to a moving vacuum cleaner (“A lot of dogs follow it around nervously”).
For her part, Babu mostly sat quietly throughout the tests and avoided the Bumble Ball and vacuum. She did respond to a few communicative cues but didn’t seem very interested in contributing to science. (In her defense, she’s an older dog and has a hip dysplasia that makes walking difficult.)
“Babu is pretty chill,” Tomeo says, offering an unofficial scientific assessment. “They’re all unique, and there’s no wrong or right in these tests. It’s just her personality.”
It was as if Tomeo could feel my disappointment. I suppose I was hoping Babu would show off some secret skill or something that might surprise Hecht, Tomeo and the research team — something beyond indifference. Most of all, I wanted her to behave in a way that would reveal our bond to each other.
Then, as the research team wrapped up the penultimate test, Babu’s ears perked up and her eyes fixed on the laboratory door. The last leg of the series of tests reunites the dog and owner.
“See, it’s like she knows,” Tomeo says. “She’s waiting for you.”
Photos by Clay R. Miller
