Horses Remember Facial Expressions of People They’ve Seen Before
Published Thursday 26 April 2018 in the journal, Current Biology, the paper ‘Animals remember previous facial expressions that specific humans have exhibited’ is authored by a team of psychologists, co-led by Professor Karen McComb from the University of Sussex and Dr Leanne Proops, from the University of Portsmouth – both specialists in animal behaviour.
Credit: University of Sussex
The study found that despite the humans being in a neutral state during the live meeting, the horses’ gaze direction revealed that they perceived the person more negatively if they had previously seen them looking angry in the photograph rather than happy.
Previous research, including at University of Sussex, has shown that animals tend to view negative events with their left eye due to the right brain hemisphere’s specialisation for processing threatening stimuli (information from the left eye is processed in the right hemisphere). I
mportantly, in the current experiment the humans did not know which photographs the horses had previously seen, to avoid any risk of behaving differently themselves. Also the differences in reaction only applied to the person the horses had actually seen in the photograph and were not given to a different person.
Professor McComb from the University of Sussex comments on the findings: “What we’ve found is that horses can not only read human facial expressions but they can also remember a person’s previous emotional state when they meet them later that day – and, crucially, that they adapt their behaviour accordingly. Essentially horses have a memory for emotion.”
Co-lead author Dr Proops, of the University of Portsmouth, said: “We know that horses are socially intelligent animals, but this is the first time any mammal has been shown to have this particular ability. What’s very striking is that this happened after just briefly viewing a photograph of the person with a particular emotional expression – they did not have a strongly positive or negative experience with the person.”
Although past research (including that conducted by the University of Sussex) has demonstrated that horses can recognise human facial expressions, this is the first time that it has been shown that they can remember emotional experiences with specific individuals. This ability could have clear benefits for social bonding and aggression avoidance when these individuals are encountered again.
Contacts and sources:
Anna Ford
University of Sussex
Citation: Animals Remember Previous Facial Expressions that Specific Humans Have Exhibited.
Leanne Proops, Kate Grounds, Amy Victoria Smith, Karen McComb. Current Biology, 2018; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.03.035
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2018/04/horses-remember-facial-expressions-of.html
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