Unwilling or willing but unable: can horses interpret human actions as goal directed?

The research article studies whether domestic horses can understand and react to human intentions. It investigates if horses can differentiate between a human who doesn’t want to provide food (unwilling) and a human who wants to but is unable to provide it (unable).

Objective and Methodology

• The study primarily aims to determine if horses, like primates, are capable of interpreting human behavior as goal-directed.
• This research employs an ‘unwilling versus unable’ framework. In this, the experimenter conducts three similar actions targeting a horse, but each with different intentions.
• In the unwilling condition, the experimenter purposely keeps a piece of food out of the horse’s reach.
• In the two unable conditions, the experimenter intends to give the food to the horse but is obstructed either due to a physical barrier or the experimenter feigning clumsiness.
• The horses’ reactions under these different conditions are observed and recorded.

Observations and Findings

• 21 horses were a part of this study, and their reactions in the three scenarios were different.
• The horses displayed more interest in the ‘unable’ situations rather than the ‘unwilling’ scenario, particularly when the experimenter was pretending to be clumsy.
• The horses’ reactions were aligned with those observed in primates under identical conditions of the experiment.

Conclusion and Implications

• The findings of this research suggest that horses potentially have the cognitive ability to comprehend the experimenter’s goals or intentions and modify their behavior accordingly.
• This indicates the likelihood of an advanced level of interspecies social cognition in horses towards humans which can enable efficient human-horse interactions.