Learning by watching: how smart are horses, really?
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- čas přidán 25. 04. 2021
- Are horses clever enough to learn by observation? The team explains social learning, the ways it can be applied in training and management, and how young horses learn my following mum's lead. Find out how learning by watching depends on the horse's age and rank in the hierarchy, and discover how you can use these natural learning systems with your own horse.
Published research referenced in this video:
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My shire mare is 14, and learned to remove the water heater when I go to clean the tub in the winter. She saw me do it once or twice from close range, and then one day she came, removed the heater and gently set it aside. No other horses even did that. So they will learn from humans, if you are higher than them AND trustworthy to them perhaps.
She is the second oldest of the group, and the dominant lead mare of the herd. She can differentiate horse trailers from other enclosed trailers, as she only calls for horses when it's a horse trailer. I do not own a horse trailer so I always rent a different one when needed.
She has even negociated with me. "you give treat first then I do it" type of deal. I was floored. She was starting to do the motion I asked, then backtrack and ask for the treat with her nose. Showing me she understood but wanted treat first. I asked her agaiin and again and could see the gears turning in her head. She got a bit angry but did her motion(and I gave her the treat). Then I tested again, asked her, gave the treat right away and she did the motion perfectly, and she looked absolutely happy. Maybe in her head was a mixture of "he understands me" and " I taught him something" They say animals do not think, but that mare is making me think otherwise. I never like to anthropomorphize, but I can't deny my first hand experience with those facinating animals.
She is the weirdest animal relationship Ive ever had. She was protecting me from other horses while at the same time would try to kick the ranch owner. I would go and side with her at her sleepy time in the morning and she'd choose to rest her head next to mine on my shoulder. I'd watch around and stay still even in -25C weather and I wouldnt be cold (shes taller than me at the withers)
Wonderful story, thank you for sharing! I always love hearing people´s anectodes about their clever animals and deep relationships they´ve had with them :)
Very interesting, thank you! (new subscriber)
THANKS for your work
So interesting! Do you find horses get better at solving puzzles the more they have been exposed to? Almost as though we can develop their problem solving skills.
This is possible, but as far as I know this has not yet been studied scientifically. So far, it has simply been observed that some individuals seem to engage more readily in individual, trial and error type problem solving, while others prefer/need a demonstrator. There appear to be fewer individual leaners, and whether a horse can learn to be a problem solver is unclear at present.
@@equinesciencetalkinternati9407 Hi dears, yes there is research in this area. At least Ponies seem to profit from engaging in cognition tests, and get faster and more engaged the more they receive mental exercise. Vivian Gabor found that her Shetland Ponies did very well in numerical discrimination, they learned to count computer symbols, up five itoms. But... after a lazy period (as I remember more than a year) they sememd not to be interested in the experiments and performed very bad. Their mental capacities were not trained during this lazy period and seemed to be a little "rusty". So, yes, the mental training before, when they were still "porfessional test ponies", seemed to have improved their perfomance
Great study. By dominant do you mean the demonstrator horse has greater resource holding potential with food?
The original study says "The dominance relationships among the horses in in the field were assessed by continuously sampling agonistic encounters, such as approaches, retreats, threats to bite or kick, bites, kicks and chases (Feist and McCullough 1976, McDonnell and Haviland 1995, McDonnell 2003), over six hours, distributed over daylight hours on at least three different days." So yes, this would include behaviour around food, but also at all other times. There are a number of different ways of calculating this (See: The construction of dominance order:comparing performance of five methods using an individual-based model: Hemelrijk et al. 2005) but essentially each method is based on similar observations and behaviours. I hope this answers your question?
How does horse ranking work? Age?
I was thinking how smart Horses are. Could find better data based video without any " I think" information then yours:)
Thank you so much Tomas! It really helps to hear that we met our intention :-). Konstanze from the Equine Science Talk Team
The lady on the far right with the back turned, looks like a default NPC character in skyrim...just...there. 😂
I got something u can stare at!
MONEYYYYYYY!!!!
Why are their mouths not synced?
Horses edited this
While my own anecdotal observations agree with some of your conclusions eg, horses can learn by observation of other horses (particularly foals), most of the studies you quote appear to have design flaws which make the conclusions highly questionable. For example, the feeder box only had one lever and that lever gave access to the food. From this design you can't possibly know moving the lever was from learned observation or random chance. If there had been 2 or more levers with only one gaining access to the food, you could make a more confident conclusion if the statistics revealed a greater than random chance of moving the correct lever. This is an example where the study was designed to prove a theory and not to test a theory. It's a meaningless study.
Similar design flaws exist with your description of the horse following the human. The study looking at introduction of a horse to a herd also leaves more questions about the design than are answered.
It concerns me that videos like these are intended for non-science trained horse lovers because they give the false impression that what is said is accurate and definitive and scientifically proved. This is misleading because there are many questions yet to be answered to give your conclusions scientific rigour. I believe this is becoming a widespread problem in the horse world where people are labelling their theories as scientifically proved or evidence based to make their argument and convince the untrained horse owner.
In each case, there was a control group of horses that received no demonstration, and some of these were successful, so you are quite right that some will learn by trial and error/chance (as is highligted at the end of the video). However, as significantly more horses learned after having a demonstration than learned without demonstration, it is reasonable to assume that at least some learn from the demonstration, and, as mentioned in the video, especially if the demonstrator is older and higher ranking. Having two switches/buttons would be an interesting set up, but would be a different experiment. Then you would need to control for understanding the concept of "a switch opens the box" and "this specific switch opens the box".
The cited studies are all peer reviewed, published research and are accurate and scientifically recognised. The intention is not to convince anyone of a theory, but to present the evidence as it stands at present and encourage both fellow scientists and lay people to think about such topics and strive for a better understanding of equine behaviour.
@@sunnyandbigsy "Then you would need to control for understanding the concept of "a switch opens the box" and "this specific switch opens the box". "
Isn't that the purpose? Surely if you are arguing horses learn by observation that they learn a task and not a random set of movements. There is little evidence to show the results were not random - even random results will rarely come out 50/50 with a control group unless you use 1000s of subjects. Putting 2 or more switches or switches of different types (lever versus button versus string) minimizes the chance of a false positive result. Secondly, there is no mention of how many horses were used and if they were tested more than once or whether test horses observed several other uses using the lever and for how long and whether each test subject was controlled for how strong a drive they had for the treat in the box etc. I hope I making my point clear that the experiment might be a good first step that you would get a pass on a high school project. But if I was reviewing the paper for a journal I would send it back to the authors for more work. Its conclusions are pretty meaningless. I see this too often with equine behaviourial studies - big conclusions from inconclusive studies.
It's hard to do behaviourial studies with the same rigour you might do medical or chemical studies because the variables can be overwhelming. But that does not mean behaviourial research should get a pass on its failures.
@@RossJacobs You will find the answers to your questions on the details of the methods used in each case in the original studies. There is a full reference list in the information box under the video - you just need to click the "see more", and it all appears. Several dozen separate studies with different authors are referenced in this video, so it's easiest if you chose the ones you would like to know more about for yourself. The intention of this video is to give a broad overview of key findings, not to give detailed descriptions of the different experiments, but naturally, this information is supplied in the original studies.
I do, of course, agree that equine behavioural studies come with their own set of problems - not least of them being access to large numbers of subjects. As you say, it would be wonderful to be able to have several hundreds, if not thousands, of horses in every study, the way one would in medical research. That's just not possible, but it doesn't mean that research on fewer subjects is worthless - it just means we need to see it in the relevant context, and be careful in our interpretations. As you say, with the numbers involved in these studies, one could argue that the horses that appeared to learn from a demonstration actually learned by chance - but scientific practice is such that if that chance is less than 5%, we consider the evidence to be strong enough to look for other explanations. (Obviously, you'll find all the statistical analysis in the individual studies, as well.)
I find the idea of two mechanisms (switches/buttons) intriguing, but I do see an issue with interpreting the results. Usually, with this type of experiment, the horse has to show the behaviour (pressing the button, or whatever) on several consecutive trials (often 10) to reach the learning criteria and be considered "successful". Presumably the demonstrator presses switch A, and let's say the observer does the same for 6 trials, then goes to switch B. (Does B open the box, or not?) Whether or not the box opens, would one then say the observer had not learned, or rather it was a curious character and wanted to see what would happen if it pressed the other switch?
Anyway - many thanks for your feedback, and I hope you find the answers to your more detailed questions in the literature list.
@@sunnyandbigsy thank you for allowing me to comment and for discussing this with me.
@@RossJacobs :-) Discussion and debate is what it's all about, isn't it? That's how we move forward!