Schuetz, Aurelia and Farmer, Kate and Krueger, Konstanze (2017) Social learning across species: horses (Equus caballus) learn from humans by observation. ANIMAL COGNITION, 20 (3). pp. 567-573. ISSN 1435-9448, 1435-9456
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This study examines whether horses can learn by observing humans, given that they identify individual humans and orientate on the focus of human attention. We tested 24 horses aged between 3 and 12. Twelve horses were tested on whether they would learn to open a feeding apparatus by observing a familiar person. The other 12 were controls and received exactly the same experimental procedure, but without a demonstration of how to operate the apparatus. More horses from the group with demonstration (8/12) reached the learning criterion of opening the feeder twenty times consecutively than horses from the control group (2/12), and younger horses seemed to reach the criterion more quickly. Horses not reaching the learning criteria approached the human experimenters more often than those that did. The results demonstrate that horses learn socially across species, in this case from humans.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | DOG CANIS-FAMILIARIS; HUMAN DEMONSTRATOR; RANK; ENHANCEMENT; PERFORMANCE; ATTENTION; BEHAVIOR; TASK; Social enhancement; Equus caballus; Human demonstrator; Interspecies-specific learning; Social learning |
| Subjects: | 500 Science > 590 Zoological sciences |
| Divisions: | Biology, Preclinical Medicine > Institut für Zoologie |
| Depositing User: | Dr. Gernot Deinzer |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Dec 2018 13:10 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Feb 2019 13:44 |
| URI: | https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/976 |
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