Not much difference between your dog and Pepper.
Researchers successfully track the neural activity in a dog’s brain when it observes different emotions in a human. The researchers tested the dogs’ abilities with four human emotions as depicted in their facial expressions. The four emotions were happiness, sadness, anger and fear. Each human facial expression gave rise to different patterns of neural activity in the dogs’ brains. In other words, the dogs were able, mechanically, to process which emotion a human was experiencing. This presumably allows it to react appropriately. The research reminds one of Softbank’s Pepper robot that reads four human emotions, also from human facial expressions. They are joy, sadness, anger and surprise. Not much in it.
Link to article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0262407918305967
You might also like to browse other ethology posts: https://www.thesentientrobot.com/category/ethology/
