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How do Horses Communicate with Humans? - Animal Cognition

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How do Horses Communicate with Humans? - Animal Cognition

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In 2005, Drs. Felix Warnecken and Michael Tomasello conducted a study on altruism in human infants and chimpanzees.1 Altruism is taking action to help someone else, even when that action won't be reciprocated or otherwise benefit oneself. To put it simply, altruistic actions are motivated purely by the desire to [...]

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How do Horses Communicate with Humans? - Animal Cognition

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In 2005, Drs. Felix Warnecken and Michael Tomasello conducted a study on altruism in human infants and chimpanzees.1 Altruism is taking action to help someone else, even when that action won't be reciprocated or otherwise benefit oneself. To put it simply, altruistic actions are motivated purely by the desire to [...]

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How horses communicate with their ears, eyes |Mother Nature Network

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How horses communicate with their ears, eyes |Mother Nature Network

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Horses often rely on their ears and eyes to communicate with each other, according to a recent study.

The animals' eye direction and their large, mobile ears can be used to tell another horse where to direct its attention, which can be beneficial in locating food and avoiding predators.

The study by Jennifer Wathan, a Ph.D. student at the University of Sussex, is one of the first to examine communication methods that humans lack.

Researchers generally look at communication among animals as they would humans, focusing on communication methods we share, such as body language.

But Watham thought if she looked at the world as a horse would, she might be able to learn more about how these animals share information.

"Horses have really good vision - better than dogs or cats - but the use of facial expressions has been overlooked," she told National Geographic.

Wathan theorized that horses could use their ears to alert other horses to something in their environment, such as food or a predator.

To test her hypothesis, she photographed horses in pasture looking at one of two buckets of food.

One group of horses was photographed as normal, but in one set, the horses' ears were covered by a mask and in another, their eyes were covered.

Wathan then printed the photos so they were life-size images and showed them to horses that were presented with the same two buckets of food.

Her experiment proved that the observing horses were able to recognize that they were seeing another horse in the photo.

Wathan also found that when horses looked at the image where both the horse's eyes and ears were uncovered, they picked the food bucket the horse was looking at 75 percent of the time.

When shown photos of horses whose ears or eyes were covered by a mask, the observing horse chose between the buckets of food at random. However, the horses did slightly better when shown the photo where the horse's ears were uncovered, suggesting ears may play a greater role in horse communication than eyes.

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How horses communicate with their ears, eyes

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Horses often rely on their ears and eyes to communicate with each other, according to a recent study. The animals' eye direction and their large, mobile ears can be used to tell another horse where to direct its attention, which can be beneficial in locating food and avoiding predators.

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Horses can read human emotions -- ScienceDaily

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Horses can read human emotions -- ScienceDaily

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For the first time horses have been shown to be able to distinguish between angry and happy human facial expressions.

Psychologists studied how 28 horses reacted to seeing photographs of positive versus negative human facial expressions. When viewing angry faces, horses looked more with their left eye, a behaviour associated with perceiving negative stimuli. Their heart rate also increased more quickly and they showed more stress-related behaviours. The study, published today (10 February) in Biology Letters, concludes that this response indicates that the horses had a functionally relevant understanding of the angry faces they were seeing. The effect of facial expressions on heart rate has not been seen before in interactions between animals and humans.

Amy Smith, a doctoral student in the Mammal Vocal Communication and Cognition Research Group at the University of Sussex who co-led the research, said: "What's really interesting about this research is that it shows that horses have the ability to read emotions across the species barrier. We have known for a long time that horses are a socially sophisticated species but this is the first time we have seen that they can distinguish between positive and negative human facial expressions."

"The reaction to the angry facial expressions was particularly clear -- there was a quicker increase in their heart rate, and the horses moved their heads to look at the angry faces with their left eye."

Research shows that many species 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).

Amy continued: "It's interesting to note that the horses had a strong reaction to the negative expressions but less so to the positive. This may be because it is particularly important for animals to recognise threats in their environment. In this context, recognising angry faces may act as a warning system, allowing horses to anticipate negative human behaviour such as rough handling."

A tendency for viewing negative human facial expressions with the left eye specifically has also been documented in dogs.

Professor Karen McComb, a co-lead author of the research, said: "There are several possible explanations for our findings. Horses may have adapted an ancestral ability for reading emotional cues in other horses to respond appropriately to human facial expressions during their co-evolution. Alternatively, individual horses may have learned to interpret human expressions during their own lifetime. What's interesting is that accurate assessment of a negative emotion is possible across the species barrier despite the dramatic difference in facial morphology between horses and humans."

"Emotional awareness is likely to be very important in highly social species like horses -- and our ongoing research is examining the relationship between a range of emotional skills and social behaviour."

The horses were recruited from five riding or livery stables in Sussex and Surrey, UK, between April 2014 and February 2015. They were shown happy and angry photographs of two unfamiliar male faces. The experimental tests examined the horses' spontaneous reactions to the photos, with no prior training, and the experimenters were not able to see which photographs they were displaying so they could not inadvertently influence the horses.

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horses; veterinary medicine; nature; animals; endangered animals; new species; biology; animal learning and intelligence

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For the first time horses have been shown to be able to distinguish between angry and happy human facial expressions. Psychologists studied how 28 horses reacted to seeing photographs of positive versus negative human facial expressions. When viewing angry faces, horses looked more with their left eye, a behaviour associated with perceiving negative stimuli.