Interview with Dr. Laura V. Cuaya, winner of the NeuroImage Editor’s Choice Award 2023

Author: Kevin Sitek
Editors: Elizabeth DuPre, Alex Albury, Elisa Guma

Interview with Dr. Cuaya, winner of the Neuroimage Editor's Choice award.

If you have pet dogs, you surely know how familiar they become with the sound of your voice. But can dogs actually tell the difference between the language you speak with them and other languages they’ve never heard before? Dr. Laura V. Cuaya set out to find out, and her findings in her paper “Speech naturalness detection and language representation in the dog brain” won her the Editor’s Choice Award from NeuroImage at the 2023 OHBM Annual Meeting.

In her paper, Dr. Cuaya found unique patterns of brain activity in dogs when they were hearing voices in a familiar vs. unfamiliar language. The differences were stronger in older dogs, suggesting that more exposure to a particular language drives stronger representation of voices in that language in dogs. You can read a more in-depth summary of her paper here.

Dr. Cuaya is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria. Much of her work uses functional MRI to investigate how sensory stimulation—looking at faces, hearing voices, and touching objects—is represented in the brains of both humans and dogs. Before moving to Austria, Dr. Cuaya conducted research at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary and at the Instituto de Neurobiología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Querétaro, México.

Read on to learn about Dr. Cuaya’s experience working with canine participants in neuroimaging and what we should take away from her research!

Q1: What are the main challenges of conducting MRI studies using dogs, and how have you overcome them?
Laura V Cuaya (LVC): Surprisingly, MRI studies with dogs share some challenges with MRI studies involving human infants. For instance, experimental sessions must be brief; in our experiments, each run lasts a maximum of 6 minutes, followed by a break outside the scanner. Despite dogs' excellent social skills, there are limitations in using speech stimuli in studies with dogs compared to what we would use with adult human participants. We also pay special attention to the design of our experiments: we aim to present stimuli that are as engaging as possible (while avoiding excessive excitement that may lead to significant movements) to maintain the dogs' attention.
Despite these challenges, it is remarkable how cooperative dogs can be as participants. In fact, dogs often show more enthusiasm for participating in my experiments than many of my human friends.

Q2: What are the main take-aways of this work?
LVC: Dogs are constantly learning about their social world, including how the human language that surrounds them sounds. Our results showed that, regardless of the language dogs heard, the activity patterns in their primary auditory cortex distinguished speech from non-speech. Meanwhile, their secondary auditory cortex differentiated between Spanish and Hungarian. Interestingly, the older the dog, the better their brain distinguished between languages.
This study gave the first evidence that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages, suggesting that the ability to learn the sound regularities of a language is not uniquely human. Despite dogs never being explicitly taught the sounds of their familiar language, their brains differentiated a familiar language from an unfamiliar language. As someone with dogs in my family, it's fascinating to know that dogs continuously pick up on subtle cues from their social (and auditory) environment. I would encourage people to provide their dogs with opportunities to keep learning by giving them rich social environments.

Q3: Was there a finding that most surprised you?
LVC: The positive correlation between the age of the dog and their brain's ability to distinguish between the two languages. It seems that the longer a dog lives with its humans, the better they learn how their language sounds. Although we suspected that language discrimination was influenced by exposure and learning, we couldn’t control the amount of exposure to a language among our participants, as each family had a unique linguistic environment. We only found this result because one of the reviewers asked us about the effect of exposure on language discrimination. So, we used age as an indirect measurement of exposure to a language. We were happily surprised about this finding.

Q4: What can dogs teach us about neuroscience that other animal models cannot (ex: mice, rats, non-human primates, zebrafish, etc.)?
LVC: The family dog is a promising animal model in neuroscience for multiple reasons. Thinking from an evolutionary perspective, humans and dogs shared their last common ancestor more than 10 million years ago. Then, just some thousand years ago, dogs emerged from the wolf population—a highly social animal—as a new species through domestication. For dogs, interpreting and cooperating with people had adaptative value in their anthropogenic environment. This evolutionary perspective gives a beautiful comparative framework to the field of neuroscience, where we can compare the brain responses of two species with different evolutionary histories as they process human social information under the same experimental setting.

And here is another reason to choose family dogs as an animal model: for dogs, the human information is meaningful! During their lives they have been exposed to and interacted with humans, and—due to their domestication—dogs are born with a predisposition to understand human communicative cues. This cross-species communication is a special attribute, even compared to other domesticated species.

From a practical and ethical perspective, thanks to the trainability of dogs, we can recruit family dogs that can be trained to remain still inside an fMRI scanner. During our tests, dogs are awake and without any physical restriction, and they can leave the session at any point. We are always grateful for our participants and their families for their time and endless help in our research.

Finally, personally, I hope that by sharing insights into the social and cognitive abilities of dogs, we can contribute to fostering broader societal recognition of them as social beings and enhance their welfare.