Your pet pooch may prefer praise from you over food, a new study suggests.
Your pet pooch may prefer praise from you over food, a new study suggests.
“We are trying to understand the basis of the dog-human bond and whether it is mainly about food, or about the relationship itself,” said Gregory Burns from Emory University in the US.
Out of the 13 dogs that completed the study, researchers found that most of them either preferred praise from their owners over food, or they appeared to like both equally. “Only two of the dogs were real chowhounds, showing a strong preference for the food,” said Mr Berns.
For the study, researchers began by training the dogs to associate three different objects with different outcomes — a food, verbal praise and no reward.
The dogs then were tested 32 times on the three objects while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.
Nine of the dogs showed similar neural activation for both the praise stimulus and the food stimulus.
The dogs then underwent a behavioural experiment. Each dog was familiarised with a room that contained a simple maze — one path of the maze led to food and the other to the dog’s owner.
“Most of the dogs alternated between food and owner, but the dogs with the strongest neural response to praise chose to go to their owners 80 to 90 per cent of the time,” said Mr Berns.
“It shows the importance of social reward and praise to dogs,” he added.
