Projects

Evolution of the social brain

The evolutionary history of the human social brain is typically studied by comparative research with primates. I am looking for convergent evolution in a completely different lineage. Dogs (Canis familiaris) are not closely related to humans, but they share a close bond and a similar social and ecological environment with us for thousands of years. Dogs also show remarkable visual communicative skills with both humans and dogs, sometimes even outperforming human’s closest relatives, the chimpanzees. Thus, with my research I want to learn more about the neural bases of these skills and investigate potential similarities and differences between humans and dogs in terms of their brain functions but also organization to learn more about the foundations of social cognition. Check out the twitter thread below and my various research projects for more information.

Dog neuroimaging - research methods

The dogs participating in my research are all fully awake and unrestrained pet dogs (see also here for more information). In order to achieve this, my colleagues and I developed a training protocol using positive reinforcement in order to habituate the dogs to the scanner environment and attend the visual stimuli presentation for data collection runs up to 8 min. I am also continously working on improving current preprocessing and analysis workflows of dog neuroimaging data since data processing and analysis standards in the emerging field of canine neuroimaging are often based on human neuroimaging standards, despite neurophysiological and anatomical differences. Together with my colleagues, I have developed a pre-processing pipeline for canine neuroimaging data and investigated the BOLD signal time course in dogs. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that the BOLD signal in dogs peaks 2-3 s earlier as in humans. Based on this finding, we created a tailored haemodynamic response function (HRF) for dogs to accurately model the BOLD signal, and showed that this significantly increases detection power in dog fMRI studies. Stay tuned for further investigations on how we can improve canine neuroimaging methods.

Face & body perception

For successful social interactions, it is crucial to discriminate other individuals from, e.g., inanimate objects. Humans have brain regions selectively responding to faces and bodies and compared to objects or other complex visual stimuli, but what about dogs? In this project, we compared the neural underpinnings of face and body perception in dogs and humans to gain new insights into a potential convergent evolution of temporal face- and body-sensitive regions in dogs and humans.

Action observation

Another crucial socio-cognitive skill is the ability to understand and predict another individual’s behaviour. In humans similar brain regions are active both when they perform or observe an action. Dogs are excellent at understanding human bodily cues and imitating actions of humans or conspecifics, but does their brain process these actions similar to humans? In this project, we compare the neural bases of action observation in dogs and humans to study a potential convergent evolution and their role for social cognition.

Open (neuro)science & reproducibility

I am a big open science enthusiast and regularly promote open science through my own research practices and by teaching master students on the importance of transparent research (see teaching section). I share the data and code for all of my studies either directly as a journal supplement or on open repositories and I aim to preregister my studies and/or transparently report my research clearly differentiating between exploratory and confirmatory analysis.

Empathy, shared representations and self-other distinction

I am also involved in a number of projects investigating the neural underpinnings of empathy for pain and prosocial behaviour, as well as the mechanisms of self-other distinction.