http://t.living.msn.com/family-parenting/pets/dogs-process-voices-like-humansA team of researchers in Budapest, Hungary, trained 11 Golden Retrievers and Border Collies to lay motionless for eight minutes at a time to undergo fMRI scans. “They just love it; they can’t wait to be the next,” said study researcher Attila Andics of MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group. The dogs listened to 300 vocal sounds while the scientists investigated the region of their brains that reacted to them, and compared the results to scans of 22 humans. They found that the humans and dogs used the same “voice area” in their brains to process sounds, which may help them to understand each other’s emotions. "The really striking thing about the emotional result is that the human brain responds to dog emotions the same way it responds to human emotions, and that the dog brain, similarly, responds to human emotions the same way it responds to dog emotions," said Andics. The presence of the voice area suggests this region of human and dog brains existed in a common ancestor that lived as long as 100 millions ago. The study was published in the journal Current Biology. — Read it at the Live Science
