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Horses Can Read Our Facial Expressions
Horses understand the expressions of man's face, and they can make the difference between happy faces and angry, according to a new study published this week in Biology Letters.
Previous work has shown that horses are able to produce complex facial expressions and also collect other members of their species. They are also sensitive to us signals, too. After all, the ability to read the emotions through the species barrier would be particularly useful for social species, domestic - no matter how different our faces could watch their.
To see if they can discern our expressions, the University of Sussex team led by Amy Smith showed photographs of 28 domestic horses (Equus caballus) aged four to 23, recruited from five stables in Sussex and Surrey in the UK these are color photos of two unidentified men smile or frown . For researchers to get spontaneous reactions, horses have received no training for this experience. The team measured the heart rate of horses, which correlates with stress, and recorded their answers with camcorders.
Image in the text: A.V. Smith et al., 2016 Biol. Lett.
When horses have seen pictures of men making an angry face, their heart rate increased faster than when they looked at pictures of smiling men. In addition, many of them also moved her head to look at the picture angry with their left eye - a behavioral response previously linked to the perception of negative stimuli.
The right brain that handles information for the left eye, is specialized for processing threatening stimuli. "It is particularly important for animals to recognize threats in their environment," said Smith in a statement. "In this context, recognition of angry faces can act as a warning system, allowing horses to anticipate the negative human behavior as rough handling." This is called the left-eye polarization, and dogs do too. Neither species showed a sideways glance to facial expressions happy, since they are not threatening indices.
There are several possible explanations why horses have the ability to distinguish certain expressions of the human face. "Horses may have adapted preexisting capacity (ancestral) to respond appropriately to negative emotional expressions of their peers and, throughout their co-evolution with humans, transferred this capability to a morphologically different species," the team writes . Or, individual horses may have simply learned to interpret our words in their life.
