ArticleAnimal cognition2023
Horses form cross-modal representations of adults and children.
Article in Animal cognition, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 11 citations in OpenAlex.
- 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
- Emotional contagion of fear and joy from humans to horses using a combination of facial and vocal cues.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Influence of Walker Sex and Familiarity on Scent-Marking Behavior of Juvenile and Mature Shelter Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Horses discriminate between human facial and vocal expressions of sadness and joy.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Horses cross-modally recognize women and men.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Garrano Horses Perceive Letters of the Alphabet on a Touchscreen System: A Pilot Study.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Recently, research on domestic mammals' sociocognitive skills toward humans has been prolific, allowing us to better understand the human-animal relationship. For example, horses have been shown to distinguish human beings on the basis of photographs and voices and to have cross-modal mental representations of individual humans and human emotions. This leads to questions such as the extent to which horses can differentiate human attributes such as age. Here, we tested whether horses discriminate human adults from children. In a cross-modal paradigm, we presented 31 female horses with two simultaneous muted videos of a child and an adult saying the same neutral sentence, accompanied by the sound of an adult's or child's voice speaking the sentence. The horses looked significantly longer at the videos that were incongruent with the heard voice than at the congruent videos. We conclude that horses can match adults' and children's faces and voices cross-modally. Moreover, their heart rates increased during children's vocalizations but not during adults'. This suggests that in addition to having mental representations of adults and children, horses have a stronger emotional response to children's voices than adults' voices.
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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.