Event-related potentials to emotional incongruence in dogs using non-invasive EEG

Abstract

Abstract Previous behavioral and autonomic studies suggest that dogs are sensitive to their human emotional expressions, yet the neural mechanisms underlying how such information is processed across modalities remain unclear. This study investigated whether dogs exhibit differential neural responses to emotional incongruence in their owner’s multimodal expressions (face and voice) using electroencephalography (EEG). Dogs viewed audiovisual clips in which their owner’s facial expression (happy or angry) was paired with a congruent or incongruent vocalization. Event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to voice onset were analyzed; incongruent pairings elicited significantly larger P300 and N400 responses at frontal sites than congruent pairings, a pattern consistent with mismatch detection and increased processing demands.These findings provide electrophysiological evidence that dogs integrate facial and vocal cues when processing their owners’ emotional expressions, supporting multimodal emotion processing in the human–dog context. By revealing the temporal dynamics of this integration, the present study highlights multimodal processing of emotional information as a fundamental component of socio-emotional cognition, offering a comparative framework for investigations across species.