Do horses expect humans to solve their problems?

Domestic animals are highly capable of detecting human cues, while wild relatives tend to perform less well (e.g., responding to pointing gestures). It is suggested that domestication may have led to the development of such cognitive skills. Here, we hypothesized that because domestic animals are so...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inFrontiers in psychology Vol. 3; p. 306
Main Authors Lesimple, C, Sankey, C, Richard, M A, Hausberger, M
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland Frontiers Media 01.01.2012
Frontiers Research Foundation
Frontiers Media S.A
Subjects
Animal biology
Attention
Cognitive science
cognitive skills
dependency on humans
Horses
human-animal relationship
Life Sciences
Neuroscience
Psychology
self sufficiency
Vertebrate Zoology
attention
cognitive skills
human-animal relationship
horses
horse
bad-being decoding
abnormal behavior
questionnaire reliability
well-being recognition
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Domestic animals are highly capable of detecting human cues, while wild relatives tend to perform less well (e.g., responding to pointing gestures). It is suggested that domestication may have led to the development of such cognitive skills. Here, we hypothesized that because domestic animals are so attentive and dependant to humans' actions for resources, the counter effect may be a decline of self sufficiency, such as individual task solving. Here we show a negative correlation between the performance in a learning task (opening a chest) and the interest shown by horses toward humans, despite high motivation expressed by investigative behaviors directed at the chest. If human-directed attention reflects the development of particular skills in domestic animals, this is to our knowledge the first study highlighting a link between human-directed behaviors and impaired individual solving task skills (ability to solve a task by themselves) in horses.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
Reviewed by: Jozsef Topal, Institute of Psychology Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary; Valérie Dufour, CNRS, France
Edited by: Jeffrey R. Stevens, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
This article was submitted to Frontiers in Comparative Psychology, a specialty of Frontiers in Psychology.
ISSN:1664-1078
1664-1078
DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00306