They can run, jump and, as Olympic spectators know, dance. But horses are even smarter than previously thought, as they have shown an ability to plan ahead in strategy games.
This is what researchers at the British Nottingham Trent University discovered. They gave 20 horses a task that consisted of three phases.
► In the first phase, the Animals touch a card with their nose to get a treat. It doesn’t matter whether a light next to it was on or off.
► In the second phase, the horses only received a treat if they touched the card when the light was off. However, they repeatedly touched the card, regardless of whether the light was on or off.
► In the last phase, they had to wait ten seconds for their treat after touching the card with the light on. The animals then followed Horses suddenly the rules: They only touched the card when the light was off – to receive their reward.
Performance improved surprisingly quickly
“Animals usually need several repetitions of a task to gradually learn new To know In contrast, our horses improved immediately when we introduced a prize for mistakes. This suggests that the horses knew the rules of the game from the beginning,” say the researchers. The team was surprised at how quickly and significantly the animals’ performance improved.
Loud the studypublished in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, the results indicated that horses can use the model-based Learn as a technology. This means that they are able to create a model of the world around them in order to make decisions and predictions.
Horse brain is used differently
Until now, it was assumed that they could not do this. The reason: They have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex – the part of the Brainwho is responsible for strategic thinking.
However, the study results showed that horses must be using a different part of the brain, the researchers said: “This teaches us that we should not draw conclusions about the intelligence or sentience of animals on the basis of the fact that they are ‘built’ in the same way as we are.”