ArticleAnimal cognition2022
Both sheep and goats can solve inferential by exclusion tasks.
Article in Animal cognition, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Performance of sheep and goats in a delay of gratification task.Animal cognition · 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
- Touchscreen Tasks for Cognitive Testing in Domestic Goats (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Sheep (Ovis aries) training protocol for voluntary awake and unrestrained structural brain MRI acquisitions.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- A cognitive approach to better understand foraging strategies of the adult domestic hen.Scientific reports · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
Despite the domestication of sheep and goats by humans for several millennia, we still lack comparative data on their cognitive capacity. Comparing the cognitive skills of farm animals can help understand the evolution of cognition. In this study, we compared the performances of sheep and goats in inference by exclusion tasks. We implemented two tasks, namely a cup task and a tube task, to identify whether success in solving the task could be attributed to either low-level mechanisms (avoiding the empty location strategy) or to deductive reasoning (if two possibilities A and B, but not A, then it must be B). In contrast to a previous study comparing goats and sheep in a cup task, we showed that both species solved the inferential condition with high success rates. In the tube task, performances could not be explained by alternative strategies such as avoiding the empty tube or preferring the bent tube. When applying a strict set of criteria concerning responses in all conditions and controlling for the potential effects of experience, we demonstrate that two individuals, a goat and a sheep, fulfil these criteria. This suggests that sheep and goats are able to make inferences based on deductive reasoning.
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