Curiosity and Learning Ability in Horses

Many behaviour studies on domesticated animals have been limited to the negative side—how management practices causing fearfulness may be detrimental to horses’ cognition, welfare, and learning ability. A 2021 study explored a positive aspect of management and how fostering it could improve our horses’ ability to learn, resulting in an enriched life.

Fearfulness has been used in so many studies because it is easy to measure in horses. A horse on full alert, neck high, heart rate up, and not interested in food is easy to recognize. More positive emotions can be harder to distinguish. Novel objects usually induce some kind of fear response.

Novel objects (or in ordinary equestrian parlance, scary things) are ubiquitous around stables. Young horses especially may have never seen an enrichment toy like a ball, or the typical inside of a barn. Even a bucket being where it wasn’t yesterday can be ‘novel’. In this study, how young horses approached an interaction with a novel object was strongly predictive of learning ability in two very different learning tasks. Instead of focusing on fearfulness and its detrimental effects, the researchers looked for curiosity and whether it had any positive effects.

The animals that showed curiosity towards the novel object scored better in learning tasks. Curiosity is an intrinsic desire to investigate, even when a reward is not immediately forthcoming from the investigation. The animal is interested for interest’s sake.

Encouragingly, the authors found that fearfulness measures did not predict the horses’ performance in the learning tasks. It is important to note that fear was not induced in the novel object tests, however; the horse was given motivation to pass the object and left to do so if it was going to. No pressure was applied, which tends to increase fearfulness in a novel situation.

Instead, they found that the more curious horses, which tended to explore the new object, even if they had previously shown fearfulness, performed better on the learning tests than the others that did not explore.

Could encouraging curious behaviours in horses, or at least not hindering them, contribute to better horse-human relationships through better learning performance and enriched domestic life?

Read the full open access article here: https://rdcu.be/cejm0