Female horses spontaneously identify a photograph of their keeper, last seen six months previously - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Scientific Reports Année : 2020

Female horses spontaneously identify a photograph of their keeper, last seen six months previously

Résumé

Horses are capable of identifying individual conspecifics based on olfactory, auditory or visual cues. However, this raises the questions of their ability to recognize human beings and on the basis of what cues. This study investigated whether horses could differentiate between a familiar and unfamiliar human from photographs of faces. Eleven horses were trained on a discrimination task using a computer-controlled screen, on which two photographs were presented simultaneously (32 trials/ session): touching one was rewarded (S+) and the other not (S−). In the training phase, the S+ faces were of four unfamiliar people which gradually became familiar over the trials. The S− faces were novel for each trial. After the training phase, the faces of the horses’ keepers were presented opposite novel faces to test whether the horses could identify the former spontaneously. A reward was given whichever face was touched to avoid any possible learning effect. Horses touched the faces of keepers significantly more than chance, whether it was their current keeper or one they had not seen for six months (t = 3.65; p < 0.004 and t = 6.24; p < 0.0001). Overall, these results show that horses have advanced human facerecognition abilities and a long-term memory of those human faces.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
s41598-020-62940-w.pdf (1.15 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte

Dates et versions

hal-02550414 , version 1 (03-12-2020)

Licence

Paternité

Identifiants

Citer

Léa Lansade, Violaine Colson, Céline Parias, Miléna Trösch, Fabrice F. Reigner, et al.. Female horses spontaneously identify a photograph of their keeper, last seen six months previously. Scientific Reports, 2020, 10 (6302), pp.1-9. ⟨10.1038/s41598-020-62940-w⟩. ⟨hal-02550414⟩
97 Consultations
65 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More