The Surprising Behavior Dogs Share with Humans.mp4

A new study has found that an innate ability in dogs and humans developed before our evolutionary paths diverged nearly 100 million years ago.

Transcript

00:00numerosity in human psychology it's a sensitivity to numbers like being able to tell the difference

00:08between a couple of objects and many but now researchers from Emory University have found

00:12that man's best friend may also have this skill and they use the same part of their brains to

00:17employ it as we do the team of researchers trained 11 dogs to sit completely still in

00:21an fMRI machine while they scan their brains while showing them a series of dots observing

00:26how their brains reacted when the dogs alternated position and quantity and the researchers found

00:30that a region of the dog's brains lit up more intensely when the quantity changed just like

00:34humans and apes and it was the same parietotemporal region which the researchers say could mean that

00:39numerosity developed before man and man's best friend diverged in our evolutionary paths 90 to

00:45100 million years ago the researchers said about the discovery our finding suggests that the ability

00:50to represent numerosity and the mechanism supporting this system are deeply conserved over evolutionary

00:55time perhaps owing to a role in foraging or predation