We recognize our friends’ faces. And we’re not alone. Many social animals can identify individuals of their own species by their facial features. That’s important, because they need to be able to adjust their behavior depending on who they encounter. And research has shown that some species of monkeys, birds and domesticated animals can even distinguish among different faces by looking at photographs alone.
Scientists have also wondered whether domesticated animals that have coexisted with people for thousands of years can recognize different human faces. For example, we’ve shared more than 5,000 years of our history with horses. Plus, they can live up to 30 years and may need to retain a great deal of information about us throughout their lifetimes.
Ethologist Léa Lansade of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment did an experiment to find out how well horses can recognize individual people in photographs.
She and her team first taught the horses how to “choose” between two side-by-side images by touching their noses to a computer screen. The horses were then shown photos of their current keeper alongside faces of unfamiliar humans. They had never seen photos of any of the people before. The horses correctly identified their current keeper and ignored the stranger’s face about 75 percent of the time, significantly better than chance.
What’s more, the horses also preferentially picked photos of their previous keeper—a person they hadn’t seen in six months. In fact, even though the horses didn’t get it right every single time, they were at least as accurate in picking out their previous keeper as they were at identifying their current one. The findings are in the journal Scientific Reports. [Léa Lansade, et al., Female horses spontaneously identify a photograph of their keeper, last seen six months previously]
The results suggest that not only can horses differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar human faces, they intuitively understand that photographs are two-dimensional representations of real life without any other cues such as odor or sound. And they’re even better at this than our oldest animal companion: the domestic dog.
In addition, horses seem to have a robust long-term memory for human faces, consistent with their long life span and history of domestication. In future experiments, the researchers would like to test whether looking at photos of people that they have had bad experiences with in the past might cause horses to act anxious or even avoidant. So maybe think twice before doing anything at a stable that might give a horse a long face.
OrlaTheGremlin on May 10th, 2020 at 11:05 UTC »
If you present a horse a life size photo of another horse's face, they'll go up to sniff the nostrils like it's another horse - super cute! They eventually realise and learn to ignore the photo, but they are more convinced by mirrors.
They're pretty damn clever with memory tasks though, there was a paper in the Animal Cognition journal (Vol 12 I think) on horse's long term memory - they taught the horses tasks and re-tested them years later with no prompting. They remembered a discrimination task (shown a photo, had to select the same 3d object) 6 years later, categorisation task (select the picture of the shape with an open centre, not the solid shape) 10 years later, and after 7 years were able to apply a concept rule to select either the largest or smallest item (different horses taught different rule here). In each case the horses applied their knowledge almost immediately and performed above chance.
I'd have to dig the papers out for this, but the problem they do have is in reversal learning - once they've learned something it's incredibly hard to un-teach it. They tend to want to perform the behaviours they know worked previously, rather than trying different options. There was a maze test where they allowed horses to learn the route, then changed the maze slightly - the majority tried the original route for multiple re-tests. When they added an adverse stimuli when the horse took the wrong route, about half still went that same path again next time.
cj41398 on May 10th, 2020 at 09:07 UTC »
I’ve never worked closely with horses, but I had a lot of coworkers that did. They knew the social structure, horse gossip, and personalities of each horse so well.
It’s definitely nice to see a research article that confirms this but also anecdotally, I wild have never doubted this. They’re just big dogs with a lot more anxiety.
Also, they’re not even that anxious; we used to go into the horse fields at night to say hi and pet them while they were sleeping. They never freaked out or anything. In fact, the scariest thing that can happen is getting in between two horses who have some beef. In terms of humans, they’re very nice, love scratches just like cats and dogs, and are very smart.
Wagamaga on May 10th, 2020 at 06:26 UTC »
We recognize our friends’ faces. And we’re not alone. Many social animals can identify individuals of their own species by their facial features. That’s important, because they need to be able to adjust their behavior depending on who they encounter. And research has shown that some species of monkeys, birds and domesticated animals can even distinguish among different faces by looking at photographs alone.
Scientists have also wondered whether domesticated animals that have coexisted with people for thousands of years can recognize different human faces. For example, we’ve shared more than 5,000 years of our history with horses. Plus, they can live up to 30 years and may need to retain a great deal of information about us throughout their lifetimes.
Ethologist Léa Lansade of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment did an experiment to find out how well horses can recognize individual people in photographs.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62940-w