Abstract
Recently, research on domestic mammals’ sociocognitive skills toward humans has been prolific, allowing us to better understand the human–animal relationship. For example, horses have been shown to distinguish human beings on the basis of photographs and voices and to have cross-modal mental representations of individual humans and human emotions. This leads to questions such as the extent to which horses can differentiate human attributes such as age. Here, we tested whether horses discriminate human adults from children. In a cross-modal paradigm, we presented 31 female horses with two simultaneous muted videos of a child and an adult saying the same neutral sentence, accompanied by the sound of an adult’s or child’s voice speaking the sentence. The horses looked significantly longer at the videos that were incongruent with the heard voice than at the congruent videos. We conclude that horses can match adults’ and children’s faces and voices cross-modally. Moreover, their heart rates increased during children’s vocalizations but not during adults’. This suggests that in addition to having mental representations of adults and children, horses have a stronger emotional response to children’s voices than adults’ voices.
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Data availability
The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the INRAE data repository from the following link: https://doi.org/10.15454/SKHGKZ
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Acknowledgements
We thank Adèle, Amande, Coline, and the other volunteers who were filmed to make up the stimuli of this experiment; Estel Blasi for drawing Fig. 1; and Springer Nature Authors Services for English language and text flow editing.
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This study was funded by Institut Français du Cheval et de l’Equitation (IFCE), Grant Number 32 000809-Cognition Equine.
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All authors devised the protocol. PJ, CG, CP, FR, and LL implemented the protocol. PJ, CG, and LL coded the videos and analyzed the data from heart rate monitoring and behavior coding. PJ, MR, SY, CG, RD, LC, and LL revised the analysis and report.
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Animal care and experimental treatments complied with the French and European guidelines for housing and care of animals used for scientific purposes (European Union Directive 2010/63/EU) and were performed under the authorization and supervision of official veterinary services (Agreement Number F371752 delivered to the UEPAO animal facility by the veterinary service of the Département d’Indre et Loire, France). This experiment was approved by the Val de Loire Ethical Committee (CEEA VdL, Nouzilly, France, Authorization Number CE19-2022-1503-1). This study was reported in accordance with ARRIVE guidelines.
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Jardat, P., Ringhofer, M., Yamamoto, S. et al. Horses form cross-modal representations of adults and children. Anim Cogn 26, 369–377 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-022-01667-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-022-01667-9