🐕 How breeding and learning shape a dog's brain

Dogs’ brains bear different traces of their genetic history and what they have learned through contact with humans.

A team of researchers studied brain images from 108 dogs. Their aim was to distinguish two influences that are often difficult to separate: selection through breeding and learning acquired during life. The researchers focused on brain networks associated with communication, particularly those involved when dogs process information coming from humans.

To understand what is at stake, it is important to distinguish a breed from an individual’s experience. For generations, humans have selected certain dogs for their abilities and then bred them. This selection can favor characteristics related to behavior. By contrast, training acts throughout a dog’s life, as it learns to respond to gestures, sounds, or situations.

These two mechanisms can therefore lead to similar behaviors without producing exactly the same changes in the brain. The study published in The Journal of Neuroscience indicates that they are associated with different organizations of communication networks. Heredity and learning would thus not be interchangeable ways of producing the same effects in the brain.

The researchers relied on brain imaging to examine how different regions work together. Here, a brain network refers to several areas whose activity is linked. It is therefore not a single “communication center.” The brain processes information by coordinating several regions, and this organization can vary from one dog to another.

This finding helps explain why a dog’s social abilities do not depend solely on its breed. A predisposition resulting from selection may matter, but acquired experience also matters. Above all, the data show that these two influences can be identified separately in brain organization, making it possible to study their respective contributions more effectively.

However, it is important not to conclude that a brain image could precisely predict an animal’s behavior. Associations observed at the group level do not, on their own, determine the abilities of each dog. Age, daily environment, social interactions, and individual history may also contribute to the differences observed.

This approach now opens the possibility of comparing the effects of selection and learning in greater detail. It could in particular help researchers determine which brain characteristics are relatively stable and which change more with experience, without reducing a dog’s abilities to its membership in a breed.