Jardat Plotine, Ringhofer Monamie, Yamamoto Shinya, Gouyet Chloé, Degrande Rachel, Parias Céline, Reigner Fabrice, Calandreau Ludovic, Lansade Léa
CNRS, IFCE, INRAE, Université de Tours, PRC, 37380, Nouzilly, France.
Department of Animal Science, Teikyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan.
Anim Cogn. 2023 Mar;26(2):369-377. doi: 10.1007/s10071-022-01667-9. Epub 2022 Aug 13.
Recently, research on domestic mammals' sociocognitive skills toward humans has been prolific, allowing us to better understand the human-animal relationship. For example, horses have been shown to distinguish human beings on the basis of photographs and voices and to have cross-modal mental representations of individual humans and human emotions. This leads to questions such as the extent to which horses can differentiate human attributes such as age. Here, we tested whether horses discriminate human adults from children. In a cross-modal paradigm, we presented 31 female horses with two simultaneous muted videos of a child and an adult saying the same neutral sentence, accompanied by the sound of an adult's or child's voice speaking the sentence. The horses looked significantly longer at the videos that were incongruent with the heard voice than at the congruent videos. We conclude that horses can match adults' and children's faces and voices cross-modally. Moreover, their heart rates increased during children's vocalizations but not during adults'. This suggests that in addition to having mental representations of adults and children, horses have a stronger emotional response to children's voices than adults' voices.
最近，关于家养哺乳动物对人类的社会认知技能的研究成果丰硕，这使我们能够更好地理解人类与动物之间的关系。例如，研究表明马能够根据照片和声音区分人类，并且对个体人类和人类情感具有跨模态心理表征。这引发了一些问题，比如马在多大程度上能够区分年龄等人类属性。在此，我们测试了马是否能区分成年人类和儿童。在一个跨模态范式中，我们向31匹母马同时展示两个静音视频，一个是孩子，另一个是成年人说着相同的中性句子，并伴有成年人或孩子说出该句子的声音。与听到的声音不一致的视频相比，马注视与听到声音一致的视频的时间明显更长。我们得出结论，马能够跨模态匹配成年人和儿童的面孔与声音。此外，在儿童发声时马的心率会增加，而在成年人发声时则不会。这表明，除了对成年人和儿童有心理表征外，马对儿童声音的情感反应比对成年人声音的情感反应更强烈。
