Horses rely on and respond to human facial expressions, suggesting they understand our moods and may even be involved with us, Discovery News says, FOCUS News Agency quotes. A new study revealing how horses capture human emotions puts them in the very short list of animals that we have found to understand the expressions of our faces. So far, such ability has only been demonstrated in dogs.
"It is possible that horses have developed this ability during the six-thousand-year co-evolution with humans, or that each horse develops it individually during their lives," says Amy Smith of Sussex University, UK. In her studies, Smith and her colleagues used 28 horses from riding stables in Sussex and Surrey. Each horse has a picture of a person with different facial expressions corresponding to a particular mood.
In a publication in the journal Biology Letters, researchers point out that the reaction of horses to angry faces was clear. They have seen these images primarily with their left eye, as the right brain hemisphere specializes in the processing of threatening signals. Left eye data is processed in the right hemisphere. "This gives us real insight into the way we perceive the situation and proves that they (horses) treat it as negative," explains Prof. Karen McComb.
Previous studies have shown that horses capture the direction of human eyesight, but the new study is the first to directly identify the reaction of horses to the expression of certain emotions.
Source: www.euroscientist.com , www.pixabay.com
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