A horse's eye view: size and shape discrimination compared with other mammals

Tomonaga, Masaki; Kumazaki, Kiyonori; Camus, Florine; Nicod, Sophie; Pereira, Carlos Augusto; Matsuzawa, Tetsuro

doi:10.1098/rsbl.2015.0701

Cited by 15 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Finally, from a strictly methodological perspective, this study confirms that horses are capable of interacting with a computer-controlled screen within a conditioning framework, as has previously been demonstrated 40 , and are also able to understand the representational nature of 2-dimensional images. Testing animals in front of a computer screen displaying images of real life seems an interesting tool to test various other cognitive skills in horses in the future.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

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

Lansade

Colson

Parias

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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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.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

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

Lansade

Colson

Parias

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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“…These species are fairly well-studied, providing us with enough data to illustrate the main point of the present paper-that there is not always "one cognition". findings of unexpected cognitive skills such as social learning and face discrimination in domestic pigs (Veit et al 2017;Wondrak et al 2018) or size and shape discrimination in horses (Tomonaga et al 2015). Data from social carnivores show that they are capable of "numerically assessing" the odds during aggressive encounters and only engage in aggression when the odds are favorable or the resource value is high (McComb et al 1994;Benson-Amram et al 2011; see also Borrego 2017).…”

Section: Performing Competently-performing Poorly: Cognitive Skills Amentioning

confidence: 99%

Old and New Approaches to Animal Cognition: There Is Not “One Cognition”

et al. 2020

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Using the comparative approach, researchers draw inferences about the evolution of cognition. Psychologists have postulated several hypotheses to explain why certain species are cognitively more flexible than others, and these hypotheses assume that certain cognitive skills are linked together to create a generally “smart” species. However, empirical findings suggest that several animal species are highly specialized, showing exceptional skills in single cognitive domains while performing poorly in others. Although some cognitive skills may indeed overlap, we cannot a priori assume that they do across species. We argue that the term “cognition” has often been used by applying an anthropocentric viewpoint rather than a biocentric one. As a result, researchers tend to overrate cognitive skills that are human-like and assume that certain skills cluster together in other animals as they do in our own species. In this paper, we emphasize that specific physical and social environments create selection pressures that lead to the evolution of certain cognitive adaptations. Skills such as following the pointing gesture, tool-use, perspective-taking, or the ability to cooperate evolve independently from each other as a concrete result of specific selection pressures, and thus have appeared in distantly related species. Thus, there is not “one cognition”. Our argument is founded upon traditional Darwinian thinking, which—although always at the forefront of biology—has sometimes been neglected in animal cognition research. In accordance with the biocentric approach, we advocate a broader empirical perspective as we are convinced that to better understand animal minds, comparative researchers should focus much more on questions and experiments that are ecologically valid. We should investigate nonhuman cognition for its own sake, not only in comparison to the human model.

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“…The genus Equus includes horses, zebras, and donkeys. My colleagues and I targeted horses for study in 2014 (Matsuzawa 2017;Tomonaga et al 2015;Ringhofer et al 2017), leading to field studies in Portugal, Fig. 4 The foals are tied to a long string to keep their mothers near them.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%