Can My Horse Really Recognize My Voice?

Guess what? There is a new recent study that suggests - Yes! Your horse may in fact have the capability to match your voice to your face and applies only to people the horse already knows and is familiar with. A team of British behavior researchers have linked studies and evidence to support the theory. They state “We already know that horses can discriminate between different human faces and between familiar and unfamiliar people, but this is the first time we have shown that they can associate the right voices with the right people,” said Leanne Proops, PhD, of the Mammal Vocal Communication and Cognition Research group at the University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom. As you read the excerpt below, take note. The next time your horse gaze into your eyes and linger at your face, he/she may truly well be telling you, "I hear ya".

An except taken from the study:

"In her two-part study, Proops evaluated 72 horses that each heard one of two recorded voices saying the horse’s name over a loud speaker. The two people who had recorded the voices would stand in front of the horse, a few feet apart from each other. In the first part of the study, one person was someone the horse knew while the other was a stranger. In the second part, both people were familiar to the horse. Proops and colleague Karen McComb, PhD, watched to see which way the horse looked when he heard his name spoken over the loud speaker, and how long he looked in that direction. The team found that when the voice on the speaker belonged to someone the horse knew, the animal would almost always look quickly toward that human, Proops said. And usually, the horse continued to look at that person for a relatively long time. By contrast, if the voice belonged to the unfamiliar person, the horse took a longer time to look at that person and did not look at him or her for very long. When the horse had to choose between two familiar people in the second part of the study, the horse generally responded quickly by looking at the correct person for a relatively long time, Proops said. Interestingly, mares performed the recognition task better than geldings, she added. However, laterality (“sidedness”) was an issue for both genders, Proops said. Horses responded much more accurately when the correct person was standing on the right side of the horse, so the horse could see that person with his right eye. The horse's right brain hemisphere controls the left side of the body while the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body; apparently the horse's left hemisphere manages “cross-modal” (the seeing/hearing matching task) processing better than the right hemisphere, Proops said Also in Proops’ study, if the horses heard their owners’ voices over the loud speaker and the owner was not present, the horses tended to look either way, with no real preference to direction, she said. Based on her previous research, while the cross-modal function appeared to work in the left hemisphere, the visual and auditory cues seemed to spur a right-hemisphere brain reaction, Proops said.”