ArticleRoyal Society open science2021
Goats show higher behavioural flexibility than sheep in a spatial detour task.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Performance of sheep and goats in a delay of gratification task.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Exploring the relationship between inhibitory control and coping behaviour in horses.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Smart Ungulates: What Sheep and Goats' Performances in a Reversed-Reward Contingency Task Tell Us About the Evolution of Cognitive Flexibility.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Assessing Executive Cognitive Functions in Sheep: A Scoping Review of Recent Literature on Cognitive Tasks.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Review
- Inhibitory control tests in non-human animals: validity, reliability, and perspectives.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Review
- Compendium of 5810 genomes of sheep and goat gut microbiomes provides new insights into the glycan and mucin utilization.Microbiome · 2024Article
- Performance of goats in a detour and a problem-solving test following long-term cognitive test exposure.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to adapt to changing environments is crucial for survival and has evolved based on socio-ecological factors. Goats and sheep are closely related, with similar social structures, body sizes and domestication levels, but different feeding ecologies, i.e. goats are browsers and sheep are grazers. We investigated whether goats' reliance on more patchily distributed food sources predicted an increased behavioural flexibility compared to sheep. We tested 21 goats and 28 sheep in a spatial A-not-B detour task. Subjects had to navigate around a straight barrier through a gap at its edge. After one, two, three or four of these initial A trials, the gap was moved to the opposite end and subjects performed four B trials. Behaviourally more flexible individuals should move through the new gap faster, while those less behaviourally flexible should show greater perseveration. While both species showed an accuracy reduction following the change of the gap position, goats recovered from this perseveration error from the second B trial onwards, whereas sheep did so only in the fourth B trial, indicating differences in behavioural flexibility between the species. This higher degree of flexibility in goats compared to sheep could be linked to differences in their foraging strategies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.