ArticleFrontiers in psychology2020
Human Face Recognition in Horses: Data in Favor of a Holistic Process.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review on the effect of individual characteristics and management practices on equine cognition.Animal cognition · 2025Pooled it
- Cows visually discriminate and cross-modally recognise familiar and unfamiliar human faces in videos.PloS one · 2026Article
- Article
- Touchscreen Tasks for Cognitive Testing in Domestic Goats (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Nay to Prey: Challenging the View of Horses as a "Prey" Species.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Review
- What drives horse success at following human-given cues? An investigation of handler familiarity and living conditions.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Do you see what I see? Testing horses' ability to recognise real-life objects from 2D computer projections.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Horses cross-modally recognize women and men.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Changes in Management, Welfare, Emotional State, and Human-Related Docility in Stallions.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Handler familiarity helps to improve working performance during novel situations in semi-captive Asian elephants.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated that horses can recognize humans based simply on visual information. However, none of these studies have investigated whether this involves the recognition of the face itself, or simply identifying people from non-complex external clues, such as hair color. To go beyond this we wanted to know whether certain features of the face were indispensable for this recognition (e.g., colors, hair or eyes). The 11 horses in this study had previously learned to identify four unfamiliar faces (portrait view and in color) presented repeatedly on a screen. We thus assessed whether they were able to identify these same faces spontaneously when they were presented in four other conditions: profile view, black and white, eyes hidden, changed hairstyle. The horses' performances remained higher than chance level for all the conditions. In a choice test under real conditions, they then approached the people whose face they had learned more often than unknown people. In conclusion, when considering all the individuals studied, no single facial element that we tested appears to be essential for recognition, suggesting holistic processing in face recognition. That means horses do not base their recognition solely on an easy clue such as hair color. They can also link faces from photographs with people in real life, indicating that horses do not process images of faces as simple abstract shapes.
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