Document type: scientific article published in Animals
Preview: The behavior of animals can be altered in various ways. Horses interact on an everyday basis with humans, and some studies suggest that horses can learn new behavior from observing humans. However, scientific findings are conflicting. This study seeks to investigate if horses can learn to solve an instrumental task of opening a box, by observing human demonstration. We control for social transmission mechanisms, which require lower cognitive complexity than actual social learning. One human demonstrator either (A) fully demonstrated how to solve the task, (B) partially demonstrated the task, or (C) provided no demonstration. Thirty horses were randomly assigned to one of these treatments, and their success and behavior was observed. Horses watching the full and partial demonstrations were not more successful in solving the task than horses receiving no human demonstration. Horses that were unsuccessful showed more human- and box-oriented behavior than successful horses, which can indicate motivation to solve the task and/or frustration from being unable to solve the task. Our study suggests that the horses did not benefit from human demonstration of how to open a box to find food.
