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Social learning across species: horses (Equus caballus) learn from humans by observation

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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.

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Acknowledgements

We thank 3 anonymous referees for helping to improve the manuscript, Richard Byrne, Adam Miklósi, Joseph Call, and many other scientists for discussing the data, many persons for assisting in the experiments, several horse owners for supplying the experiment with their horses, and Martin Schuetz for helping with the construction of the experimental apparatus.

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Correspondence to Konstanze Krueger.

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Schuetz, A., Farmer, K. & Krueger, K. Social learning across species: horses (Equus caballus) learn from humans by observation. Anim Cogn 20, 567–573 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-1060-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-1060-8

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