ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Behav. Neurosci.
Sec. Individual and Social Behaviors
Behavioral lateralization is not associated with sleep macrostructure (first sleep cycle) and EEG spectral asymmetry in dogs
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Ethology, Institute of Biology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
- 2HUN-REN Magyar Kutatasi Halozat, Budapest, Hungary
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While dogs are increasingly researched in studies measuring brain activity, their paw preference (analogue of human handedness) has not yet been examined in relation to electroencephalogram (EEG) spectrum asymmetry during sleep. We investigated the connection between behavioral asymmetry and sleep characteristics in family dogs for the first time, based on dogs' behavioral lateralizations shown in different behavioral tests and dogs' EEG characteristics during sleep. Corroborating previous results, we have found individually highly variable behavioral lateralization in dogs' behavior depending on the task, and without population-level behavioral asymmetry in any of the tasks. However, dogs were more likely to show side preference in a two-way choice task than to use their paws laterally in different behavioral tasks. We found no significant correlations between dogs' behavioral lateralization and EEG spectrum asymmetry in the first sleep cycle's non-rapid eye-movement sleep or the first sleep cycle's macrostructure, with many of our results being individually significant. We suggest that these results may be related to dogs' highly variable and inconsistent behavioral lateralization patterns that do not have a pervasive local sleep effect, but non-exclusively, our results might be suggestive of underlying connections between behavioral asymmetry and sleep that warrant further investigations on larger samples.
Keywords: Family dog, Behavioral lateralization, side choice bias, sleep asymmetry, sleep macrostructure
Received: 29 Jul 2025; Accepted: 27 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Balint, Reicher, Miklósi and Gácsi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anna Balint
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