Domestic dogs are highly integrated into human society and ecology, and have become a natural model animal for analyzing cognitive evolution theory, conducting comparative cognitive research, and conducting human cognitive dysfunction disease research. Functional magnetic resonance imaging ( fMRI) is a non-invasive and safe neuroimaging technique that can reveal the temporal and spatial distribution of biological brain neural activities. In recent years, fMRI has been used to study the neural mechanisms of behavioral cognitive characteristics in domestic dogs. This paper provides an introduction to the fMRI technique. We reveal how the neural mechanisms of dog cognition were studied using fMRI of dog brains to locate the activated functional brain areas under different experimental paradigms, such as vision, smell, and hearing. The technical and method ological challenges of fMRI in canine cognitive research are also summarized. This paper provides a theoretical basis and reference for researchers who carry out cognition studies on domestic dogs and other animals.