Biology subjects

Cuaya, L. V.

Publications and source records attributed to Cuaya, L. V..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

An annotated bioacoustic dataset of dog vocalizations and related sounds during dog-human social play

Dog (Canis lupus familiaris) vocal communication occurs across a wide range of social contexts, including dog-human social play, a common and dynamic interaction in which diverse vocal signals are expressed, particularly in young dogs. However, most available open datasets of dog vocalizations focus primarily on barks, leaving other sound types underrepresented. Here we present a bioacoustic dataset of dog-human social play sessions recorded under standardized laboratory conditions, comprising 30 play sessions involving 17 young dogs (6-24 months old) of different breeds playing with familiar humans. Raw audio recordings are accompanied by two layers of annotations covering the dog sounds produced during sessions. Video recordings of the sessions are provided for contextual reference, along with metadata describing each dog and the experimental sessions. Additionally, permutation-based classification analysis showed that annotated sound categories exhibit above-chance and generalizable acoustic differences across individuals. The dataset may support research on dog vocal communication and expand the range of sounds documented during positive dog-human social interactions.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Dog brain atlas generated via spatially constrained spectral clustering

Functional parcellations enable reproducible analyses of brain organization, yet the dog fMRI field still lacks a validated, multi-scale functional atlas. We applied spatially constrained spectral clustering to a resting state fMRI dataset (n = 27 dogs) to generate whole-brain parcellations spanning 20-300 parcels. Replicability was evaluated against an independent dataset (n = 20 dogs) using Dice overlap and Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) as measures of spatial overlap and similarity; within-parcel functional coherence was assessed via homogeneity. Functional parcellations were anatomically coherent across scales, with global Dice peaking at 0.625 at N = 140 and 0.623 at N = 100, while decreasing to 0.526 at N = 300. ARI peaked at 0.48 for N = 60 and remained [≥] 0.46 through N = 180. Mean within-parcel homogeneity increased monotonically from 0.08 (N = 20) to 0.19 (N = 300). Concordance with an anatomical atlas (Johnson et al., 2020) increased at the regional level (plateau [~]0.16 for N [≥] 140) while diminishing at gyral and lobar levels as resolution increased, consistent with functionally driven sub-regional differentiation. Together, these results indicate functional segmentations that are replicable across datasets and internally coherent across scales, with intermediate resolutions (100-140 parcels) balancing specificity and reproducibility for common analyses. We introduce a comprehensive, multi-scale functional dog brain atlas derived from data-driven clustering, providing an open resource for comparative studies of brain evolution and canine cognition.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Comparative fMRI reveals differences in the functional organization of the visual cortex for animacy perception in dogs and humans

The animate-inanimate category distinction is one of the general organizing principles in the primate high-level visual cortex. Much less is known about the visual cortical representations of animacy in non-primate mammals with a different evolutionary trajectory of visual capacities. To compare the functional organization underlying animacy perception of a non-primate to a primate species, here we performed an fMRI study in dogs and humans, investigating how animacy structures neural responses in the visual cortex of the two species. Univariate analyses identified animate-sensitive bilateral occipital and temporal regions, non-overlapping with early visual areas, in both species. Multivariate tests confirmed the categorical representations of animate stimuli in these regions. Regions sensitive to different animate stimulus classes (dog, human, cat) overlapped less in dog than in human brains. Together, these findings reveal that the importance of animate-inanimate distinction is reflected in the organization of higher-level visual cortex, also beyond primates. But a key species difference, that neural representations for animate stimuli are less concentrated in dogs than in humans suggests that certain underlying organizing principles that support the visual perception of animacy in primates may not play a similarly important role in other mammals.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Smile at Me! Dogs Activate The Temporal Cortex Towards Smiling Human Faces

Dogs can interpret emotional human faces (especially the ones expressing happiness), yet the cerebral correlates of this process are unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we studied eight awake and unrestrained dogs. In Experiment 1 dogs observed happy and neutral human faces, and found increased brain activity when viewing happy human faces in temporal cortex and caudate. In Experiment 2 the dogs were presented with human faces expressing happiness, anger, fear, or sadness. Using the resulting cluster from Experiment 1 we trained a linear support vector machine classifier to discriminate between pairs of emotions and found that it could only discriminate between happiness and the other emotions. Finally, evaluation of the whole-brain fMRI time courses through a similar classifier allowed us to predict the emotion being observed by the dogs. Our results show that human emotions are specifically represented in dogs brains, highlighting their importance for inter-species communication.

animal behavior and cognition↗