A dog sitting inches from a favorite treat can face a difficult problem.

The food is close enough to grab, but an owner has said to wait, so the dog has to stop itself from taking something it clearly wants. That everyday moment matters because self-control supports attention, decision-making, and the ability to stay focused on a goal.

A new experiment suggests that dogs show a human-like pattern of brain activity when they resist temptation, giving researchers a new way to examine how control works across species. In the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University, Márta Gácsi has studied how dogs can help researchers understand conditions that also affect humans.

“Dogs live and age faster than humans but move in the same environments and adapt to the same social and physical challenges,” Gácsi said. “This means that developmental and age-related factors associated with pathological conditions can be examined more time-efficiently than in human populations.”

The team worked with 14 dogs that had already learned not to take food or a toy when their owner told them to wait. Across the experiment, the researchers collected 226 short recordings of the dogs’ brain activity. During the main task, a reward the dog wanted was placed within reach, where it could be seen and smelled. The owner told the dog to wait for about 30 seconds before allowing it to take the reward.

Other recordings captured the dogs while they were awake without that extra temptation. This allowed the team to compare a resting period with a moment when the animal had to hold back. Ivaylo Borislavov Iotchev of the HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences helped develop and carry out the experiment. “We measured 226 short EEG recordings, each around half a minute long, from fourteen dogs who for the duration of a recording were either obeying a command or idle,” Iotchev said.

“This data was then analyzed to see if within and across dogs, theta waves are more pronounced for recordings in which the animals were obeying the restraint command.” The researchers said the dogs did not appear to be simply following a command on autopilot.

When they had to stop themselves from taking the reward, their brains showed theta activity similar in frequency and location to activity linked with self-control in humans.