ArticleBrain structure & function2021
Neurodevelopmental scaling is a major driver of brain-behavior differences in temperament across dog breeds.
Article in Brain structure & function, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Non-invasive canine electroencephalography (EEG): a systematic review.BMC veterinary research · 2025Pooled it
- Dog brain representations of human facial expressions: Encoding happiness and differentiating specific negative expressions.iScience · 2026Article
- Phenome-wide study connects behavioral genetics of odor detection dogs with temperament traits.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Comparing owner reported and genetic breed identification reveals high concordance in a large cohort from the Dog Aging Project.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Brain-Behavior Differences in Premodern and Modern Lineages of Domestic Dogs.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Behavioural differences and similarities between dog breeds: proposing an ecologically valid approach for canine behavioural research.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Article
- Organization of distributed cortical connections underlying the processing of auditory information in dogs assessed by diffusion MRI.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Breed function and behaviour correlate with endocranial volume in domestic dogs.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Variations in Canine Behavioural Characteristics across Conventional Breed Clusters and Most Common Breed-Based Public Stereotypes.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- You talkin' to me? Functional breed selection may have fundamentally influenced dogs' sensitivity to human verbal communicative cues.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Personality Unleashed: Surveying Correlation of Neuter Status and Social Behaviour in Mixed-Breed Male Dogs across Weight Classes.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Action observation reveals a network with divergent temporal and parietal cortex engagement in dogs compared with humans.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Neuroanatomical asymmetry in the canine brain.Brain structure & function · 2023Article
- Comparative neurogenetics of dog behavior complements efforts towards human neuropsychiatric genetics.Human genetics · 2023Review
- The brain of the silver fox (Vulpes vulpes): a neuroanatomical reference of cell-stained histological and MRI images.Brain structure & function · 2023Article
- The Science and Social Validity of Companion Animal Welfare: Functionally Defined Parameters in a Multidisciplinary Field.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Animal-friendly behavioral testing in field studies: examples from ground squirrels.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- Article
- Latent class analysis of behavior across dog breeds reveal underlying temperament profiles.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 6 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Behavioral traits like aggression, anxiety, and trainability differ significantly across dog breeds and are highly heritable. However, the neural bases of these differences are unknown. Here we analyzed structural MRI scans of 62 dogs in relation to breed-average scores for the 14 major dimensions in the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire, a well-validated measure of canine temperament. Several behavior categories showed significant relationships with morphologically covarying gray matter networks and regional volume changes. Networks involved in social processing and the flight-or-fight response were associated with stranger-directed fear and aggression, putatively the main behaviors under selection pressure during wolf-to-dog domestication. Trainability was significantly associated with expansion in broad regions of cortex, while fear, aggression, and other "problem" behaviors were associated with expansion in distributed subcortical regions. These results closely overlapped with regional volume changes with total brain size, in striking correspondence with models of developmental constraint on brain evolution. This suggests that the established link between dog body size and behavior is due at least in part to disproportionate enlargement of later-developing regions in larger brained dogs. We discuss how this may explain the known correlation of increasing reactivity with decreasing body size in dogs.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.