A team of scientists from Nottingham Trent University (NTU) in the UK has discovered that horses, when denied a reward for not following the rules of a game, are able to instantly change their strategy to achieve a larger reward. This shows that these animals are capable of thinking and planning ahead, something that was previously considered far-fetched.
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The study published by the journal Applied Animal Behavior Sciencea specialist journal of the International Society for Applied Ethnology (ISAE), can help improve the relationship between horses and their caregivers by better understanding how they behave and thus improving their welfare.
“Horses are not natural geniuses, and they are thought to be average, but this study shows that they are not average and are actually more cognitively advanced than we think,” explains Carrie Ijichi, senior lecturer in equine science at National Taiwan University and one of the study’s authors, in statements collected by several agencies.
Learn about horses through games
To reach these conclusions, the NTU researchers proposed an activity divided into three stages. At the beginning, the animals had to touch a card with their snouts to get a reward. At the second stage, things got more complicated with the introduction of light. The horses could only eat if they touched the card with the light off. At that point, the scientists realized that the horses continued to touch the cards “blindly,” without taking into account whether the light was on or off. However, they did get a reward when they touched the card with the light off.
In the final level of the game, there was a 10-second penalty for touching the card when the stop light was on. The team was surprised to see that the horses followed the rules, rather than randomly touching the card, and only made the move at the right moment to claim their prize.
According to the researchers, this suggests that rather than not understanding the rules of the game at all, the horses understood them from the start, only because they found a way to play in the second stage that did not require as much attention.
strategic thinking
“We expected this performance,” said Louise Evans, a PhD student in NTU’s School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences and lead author of the study, after the match.
Of the horses, the improvement was when we introduced timeout, but we were surprised by how quickly and significantly the improvement occurred. Animals often need to repeat a task multiple times to gradually acquire new knowledge, whereas our horses improved when we introduced a cost for mistakes. “This suggests that the horses knew the rules of the game from the start.”
However, researchers suggest that horses have the ability to form an internal model of the world around them to make decisions and predictions, a technique known as “model-based learning.”
Previously, it was thought that model-based learning was too complex for horses, because they have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with strategic thinking. In this sense, Kari Ijichi asserts, horses “must use another area to achieve a similar result.”
“This teaches us that we should not make assumptions about animals’ intelligence or sentience based on whether they are ‘built’ or not,” he says.
A.A. (dpa, The Guardian, Applied Animal Behavior Science)
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