Dogs Prefer Praise Over Food, Sometimes

Think your dog likes food? Try praising her. Then try praising her for not liking food as much as she likes praise. Researchers at Emory University recently set out to determine which dogs like more: food or praise. An Emory news release reports that the researchers first trained the dogs to associate three different objects with different outcomes. A pink toy truck signaled a food reward; a blue toy knight signaled verbal praise from the owner; and a hairbrush signaled no reward, to serve as a control. The dogs were then tested on the three objects while in an fMRI machine that revealed activity in their brains’ reward center. Ready? The envelope please….All of the dogs showed a stronger response for the reward stimuli compared to the stimulus that signaled no reward. No, not surprising. Four of the dogs showed a particularly strong activation for the stimulus that signaled praise from their owners. Nine of the dogs showed similar neural activation for both the praise stimulus and the food stimulus. And two of the dogs consistently showed more activation when shown the stimulus for food. Wait, there’s more. In the next experiment, each dog was familiarized with a room that contained a simple Y-shaped maze constructed from baby gates: One path of the maze led to a bowl of food and the other path to the dog’s owner. The owners sat with their backs toward their dogs. The dog was then repeatedly released into the room and allowed to choose one of the paths. If they came to the owner, the owner praised them. 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 percent of the time.