Titre : | Female horses spontaneously identifiy a photograph of their keeper, last seen six months previously (2020) |
Auteurs : | Léa Lansade, Premier auteur ; Violaine Colson, Auteur ; Céline Parias, Auteur ; Miléna Trösch, Auteur ; Fabrice Reigner, Auteur ; Ludovic Calandreau, Dernier auteur |
Type de document : | Article : texte imprimé |
Dans : | SCIENTIFIC REPORTS (10, 6302, 2020) |
Article en page(s) : | 9p |
Langues: | Anglais |
Mots-clés : |
Equivoc Cognition ; Relation Homme-Animal |
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 face-recognition abilities and a long-term memory of those human faces. |
Cote du document numérique : | 19969 |
Classement cheval : | E13 |
En ligne : | oui |
En ligne : | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62940-w |
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19969 Adobe Acrobat PDF |