Several studies have shown that horses can recognise humans by associating their voice with their physical appearance. This ability to recognize a person, or object, based on information from multiple senses, such as sight, sound and smell, is known as “cross-modal recognition”.
“To date, it remains unknown whether horses that are regularly in contact with humans are able to cross-modally recognize women and men. Thus, we sought to evaluate this ability in the current study.” wrote Chloé Gouyet and colleagues in the article published in Scientific Reports.
“This study aimed to investigate whether horses are able to associate a woman’s voice with a woman’s face and a man’s voice with a man’s face, using a preferential looking paradigm.”
In equine research, the “preferential looking paradigm” is often used to investigate whether horses have visual preferences for different stimuli. For example, researchers may present horses with pairs of images, such as a natural pasture scene set against a man-made environment, or an angry face compared with a happy face. By measuring which of the pair of images the horse spends more time looking at, researchers can infer the horse's preference.
The researchers explain: “We simultaneously presented two videos of women and men’s faces, while
playing a recording of a human voice belonging to one of these two categories through a loudspeaker.”
This procedure was repeated in six trials. The videos changed at each trial, so each horse saw six different women and six different men.
“Our hypothesis was that horses would look preferentially at one of the videos depending on the vocal stimulus.”
Analysis of the results showed that the horses looked significantly more towards the man’s face when hearing the male voice; and towards the woman’s face when hearing the female voice.
The findings suggest that horses can associate women’s voices with women’s faces and men’s voices with men’s faces.
“Further investigation is necessary to determine the mechanism underlying this recognition, as it might be interesting to determine which characteristics horses use to categorize humans” the researchers suggest.
“These results suggest a novel perspective that could allow us to better understand how horses perceive humans.”
For more details, see:
Horses cross-modally recognize women and men
Chloé Gouyet, Monamie Ringhofer, Shinya Yamamoto, Plotine Jardat, Céline Parias, Fabrice Reigner, Ludovic Calandreau & Léa Lansade
Scientific Reports vol 13, 3864 (2023)
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