- 1Department
Equine Economics, Faculty Agriculture, Economics and Management,
Nuertingen-Geislingen University, Neckarsteige 6-10, 72622, Nürtingen,
Germany.
- 2School of Psychology and Neuroscience, St
Andrews University, St Mary's Quad, South Street, St Andrews, Fife, KY16
9JP, Scotland, UK.
- 3Department Equine Economics,
Faculty Agriculture, Economics and Management, Nuertingen-Geislingen
University, Neckarsteige 6-10, 72622, Nürtingen, Germany.
Konstanze.Krueger@hfwu.de.
- 4Zoology/Evolutionary
Biology, University of Regensburg, Universitätsstraße 31, 93053,
Regensburg, Germany. Konstanze.Krueger@hfwu.de.
Abstract
This
study examines whether horses can learn by observing humans, given that
they identify individual humans and orientate on the focus of human
attention. We tested 24 horses aged between 3 and 12. Twelve horses were
tested on whether they would learn to open a feeding apparatus by
observing a familiar person. The other 12 were controls and received
exactly the same experimental procedure, but without a demonstration of
how to operate the apparatus. More horses from the group with
demonstration (8/12) reached the learning criterion of opening the
feeder twenty times consecutively than horses from the control group
(2/12), and younger horses seemed to reach the criterion more quickly.
Horses not reaching the learning criteria approached the human
experimenters more often than those that did. The results demonstrate
that horses learn socially across species, in this case from humans.
KEYWORDS:
Equus caballus; Human demonstrator; Interspecies-specific learning; Social enhancement; Social learning
