ArticleScientific reports2023
Horses cross-modally recognize women and men.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 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
4 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 7 citations in OpenAlex.
- A systematic review on the effect of individual characteristics and management practices on equine cognition.Animal cognition · 2025Pooled it
- Hearing shapes: the Bouba-Kiki effect in adult domestic dogs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Cows visually discriminate and cross-modally recognise familiar and unfamiliar human faces in videos.PloS one · 2026Article
- Horses discriminate between human facial and vocal expressions of sadness and joy.Animal cognition · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 6 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Several studies have shown that horses have the ability to cross-modally recognize humans by associating their voice with their physical appearance. However, it remains unclear whether horses are able to differentiate humans according to different criteria, such as the fact that they are women or men. Horses might recognize some human characteristics, such as sex, and use these characteristics to classify them into different categories. The aim of this study was to explore whether domesticated horses are able to cross-modally recognize women and men according to visual and auditory cues, using a preferential looking paradigm. We simultaneously presented two videos of women and men's faces, while playing a recording of a human voice belonging to one of these two categories through a loudspeaker. The results showed that the horses looked significantly more towards the congruent video than towards the incongruent video, suggesting that they are able to associate women's voices with women's faces and men's voices with men's faces. Further investigation is necessary to determine the mechanism underlying this recognition, as it might be interesting to determine which characteristics horses use to categorize humans. These results suggest a novel perspective that could allow us to better understand how horses perceive humans.
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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.