Are horses as stupid as we think? Neigh! Scientists find equines switch strategies to get rewards when they are denied treats for not following the rules
They say only fools and horses work.
But horses are much smarter than previously thought, scientists say. A study found that the animals performed better than expected in a complicated game.
Researchers found that when horses were not rewarded for breaking the rules, they could immediately switch strategies to get more rewards.
It shows that the animals have the ability to think ahead and plan, something scientists from Nottingham Trent University (NTU) said was previously thought unthinkable.
Understanding how horses learn can help caregivers train them more humanely and improve their welfare, the team said.
Scientists have said horses are much smarter than previously thought, after a study showed the animals performed better than expected in a complicated game.
Dr Carrie Ijichi, senior lecturer in equine science at NTU, said: ‘Horses are not natural geniuses. They are seen as average, but this research shows that they are not average and that they are even more cognitively advanced than we think.’
To learn more, the researchers gave 20 horses a three-phase task.
In the first phase, the animals touched a piece of cardboard with their nose to receive a reward.
But things got more complicated when a light was introduced and horses were only allowed to eat if they touched the card while the light was off.
The team found that the horses continued to blindly touch the card regardless of whether the light was on or off, and were rewarded for correct answers.
In the final phase of the match, a penalty was imposed where touching the card while the ‘stop’ light was on resulted in a 10-second time-out.
But instead of randomly touching the card, the team found that the horses actually followed the rules, moving only at the right time to get their reward.
According to the researchers, this suggests that the horses did not completely misunderstand the rules of the game, but that they understood them all the time. However, by the second stage, they had found a way to play the game that did not require much attention.
Louise Evans, a PhD candidate in NTU’s School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences, said: ‘We expected the horses’ performance to improve when we introduced the time-out, but we were surprised by how immediate and significant the improvement was.
‘Animals normally need multiple repetitions of a task to gradually acquire new knowledge, whereas our horses made immediate progress when we introduced a cost for errors.
This suggests that the horses knew the rules of the game all along.’
According to the researchers, the findings, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, suggest that horses have the ability to form an internal model of the world around them in order to make decisions and predictions. This technique is known as model-based learning.
Model-based learning was previously thought to be too complex for horses because their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in strategic thinking, is not yet fully developed.
According to Dr. Ijichi, this suggests that the snakes “must use a different area of the brain to achieve a similar result.”
She said: ‘This tells us that we should not make assumptions about the intelligence or consciousness of animals based on whether they are ‘built’ like us.’