Abstract
Domestic animals are highly capable of detecting human cues, while wild relatives tend to perform less well (e.g., responding to pointing gestures). It is suggested that domestication may have led to the development of such cognitive skills. Here, we hypothesized that because domestic animals are so attentive and dependant to humans’ actions for resources, the counter effect may be a decline of self sufficiency, such as individual task solving. Here we show a negative correlation between the performance in a learning task (opening a chest) and the interest shown by horses toward humans, despite high motivation expressed by investigative behaviors directed at the chest. If human-directed attention reflects the development of particular skills in domestic animals, this is to our knowledge the first study highlighting a link between human-directed behaviors and impaired individual solving task skills (ability to solve a task by themselves) in horses.
Highlights
Domestic animals are highly efficient in detecting human cues, even subtle ones (e.g., Gacsi et al, 2004; Maros et al, 2008; Proops et al, 2009), while close wild relatives tend to perform less well in human related tasks, such as responding to pointing gestures or gaze direction (Hare et al, 2002; Miklosi et al, 2003; Gacsi et al, 2005)
If human-directed attention reflects the development of particular skills in domestic animals, this is to our knowledge the first study highlighting a link between human-directed behaviors and impaired individual solving task skills in horses
We investigated whether the performance of domestic horses in an instrumental learning task was influenced by their attention toward the human present
Summary
Domestic animals are highly efficient in detecting human cues, even subtle ones (e.g., Gacsi et al, 2004; Maros et al, 2008; Proops et al, 2009), while close wild relatives tend to perform less well in human related tasks, such as responding to pointing gestures or gaze direction (Hare et al, 2002; Miklosi et al, 2003; Gacsi et al, 2005). Whether the domestication process or experience with humans (or both) are involved, these processes are generally viewed as a progress in the development of specific sophisticated cognitive skills, such as human signals reading. Both dogs (Adachi et al, 2007) and horses (Proops et al, 2009; Sankey et al, 2011) have been shown to have expectations of humans’ behavior in a given context. It was shown that dogs that gaze more at their owner have lower success in problem solving tasks (Topál et al, 1997)
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