from the Geee-Wilbuuur,-you-look-angry-todaaay dept.
Beware the long face: horses remember your mood
The following news is straight from the horse's mouth: our equine companions can remember human facial expressions, and an angry grimace will leave a horse more wary of that individual, scientists claim.
The research follows previous work by the team from University of Sussex which compiled a directory of horse facial expressions and revealed that Black Beauty can read your emotions – a phenomenon also seen in dogs.
"We knew that horses could register emotional expressions, so we wanted to know if they could remember them, so that they can actually use those memories to guide their future interactions with specific individuals," said Karen McComb, co-author of the study and professor of animal behaviour and cognition at the University of Sussex.
McComb and colleagues analysed data from 11 horses who had been shown a photograph of a human pulling an angry face and 10 horses shown a picture of a human smiling.
Each horse was shown a large photograph of one of two participants for two minutes; three to six hours later they were brought face-to-face with the person they had seen in the photograph who was sporting a neutral expression. To avoid the possibility of giving tell-tale cues, the person was unaware whether it was a happy or angry photo of [them] that had been previously shown to the horse.
The small study, published in the journal Current Biology [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.03.035] [DX], reveal that horses who had been earlier been[sic] shown an angry photo of the participant spent longer viewing them with their left eye than those who had seen a happy photo.
That, said McComb is important because information from the left eye is sent to the right hemisphere of the brain, where potential threats and dangers are processed. By contrast, those who had seen the happy photo spent longer looking at the person with their right eye than those who had seen an angry image. "The left hemisphere of the brain connects to the right gaze and is more specialised for prosocial, positive-type reactions," said McComb.
Also at EurekAlert.
Related: New Tech Aims to Improve Communication between Dogs and Humans
Your Dog Understands More Than You Think
Dogs Use Facial Expressions to Influence Humans
Related Stories
North Carolina State University researchers have developed a suite of technologies that can be used to enhance communication between dogs and humans, which has applications in everything from search and rescue to service dogs to training our pets.
“We’ve developed a platform for computer-mediated communication between humans and dogs that opens the door to new avenues for interpreting dogs’ behavioral signals and sending them clear and unambiguous cues in return,” says Dr. David Roberts, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-lead author of a paper on the work. “We have a fully functional prototype, but we’ll be refining the design as we explore more and more applications for the platform.” The platform itself is a harness that fits comfortably onto the dog, and which is equipped with a variety of technologies.
http://news.ncsu.edu/2014/10/bozkurt-dogs-2014/
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&tp=&arnumber=6914468 [Paywalled]
Neuroscientists from the University of Budapest used brain scanners to investigate the brain activity of dogs when they heard their owner's voice, and specific words spoken by the owner. The dogs heard both meaningful and nonsense words spoken in praising and neutral tones. They found that dogs respond to actual words and not just the tone in which they are spoken, which suggests dogs do comprehend the words. Their work appears in the latest issue of Science.
When the scientists analyzed the brain scans, they saw that—regardless of the trainer's intonation—the dogs processed the meaningful words in the left hemisphere of the brain, just as humans do, they write this week in Science. But the dogs didn't do this for the meaningless words. "There's no acoustic reason for this difference," Andics says. "It shows that these words have meaning to dogs."
From the paper's abstract:
During speech processing, human listeners can separately analyze lexical and intonational cues to arrive at a unified representation of communicative content. The evolution of this capacity can be best investigated by comparative studies. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored whether and how dog brains segregate and integrate lexical and intonational information. We found a left-hemisphere bias for processing meaningful words, independently of intonation; a right auditory brain region for distinguishing intonationally marked and unmarked words; and increased activity in primary reward regions only when both lexical and intonational information were consistent with praise. Neural mechanisms to separately analyze and integrate word meaning and intonation in dogs suggest that this capacity can evolve in the absence of language.
Dogs have pet facial expressions to use on humans, study finds
Dogs really do turn on the puppy eyes when humans look at them, according to researchers studying canine facial expressions. Scientists have discovered that dogs produce more facial movements when a human is paying attention to them – including raising their eyebrows, making their eyes appear bigger – than when they are being ignored or presented with a tasty morsel.
The research pushes back against the belief that animal facial expressions are largely unconscious movements, that reflect internal sentiments, rather than a way to communicate. "Facial expression is often seen as something that is very emotionally driven and is very fixed, and so it isn't something that animals can change depending on their circumstances," said Bridget Waller, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Portsmouth, and an author of the study.
Also at Popular Science.
Human attention affects facial expressions in domestic dogs (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-12781-x) (DX)
Earlier research: Paedomorphic Facial Expressions Give Dogs a Selective Advantage (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0082686) (DX)
Related: Ethiopian Wolves and Gelada Monkeys Show Signs of Cooperation
Your Dog Remembers More Than You Might Think
STSR Tests Confirm That Dogs Have Self-Awareness
(Score: 4, Funny) by archfeld on Friday April 27 2018, @03:52AM (4 children)
They asked and Mr. Ed responded. This just in, Lassie thinks Timmy is a needy douche bag, and Flipper thinks Bud and Sandy are out of control delinquents.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @04:09AM (3 children)
Flipper will shit on your bed. Quick, bang your own sister before the amnesia wears off.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday April 27 2018, @03:37PM (1 child)
Flipper would probably be dead, before you got him to your bed. Since, Flipper is a dolphin and needs water to survive. Unless your bed is in the ocean, in which case, Flipper wallowing on your bed is the least of your problems.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by archfeld on Saturday April 28 2018, @02:28AM
That is what a waterbed is for :)
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @06:48AM
You speak as if from extensive personal experience. Is your sister any good ? Maybe I'll look her up when I'm in the backwoods looking for a Sasquatch next time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP1SgZvjheM [youtube.com]
Guni gugu
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @04:02AM (11 children)
"Great news! You're going to the glue factory!!"
Can horses be tricked by lying sociopaths like, say, Mikey Davey Crowfard?
Oh no! Croward ain't an antisocial liar doing us no disservice! All them soggy jobs are totally real. Keeping it real, braw. Really fucking fake.
Fuck MDC.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @04:06AM (3 children)
Mikal Dikhed Crowfuck!
Oi yeah nah. Fuck that guy
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @04:11AM
Mickey Dick head Crow fuck Cannot silence Me!
I wonder if his head would make a good bowling ball. Nah yeah oi.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Friday April 27 2018, @07:45AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @06:33PM
Jobs is dead man. The big C got him a few years ago.
(Score: 2) by Shimitar on Friday April 27 2018, @06:07AM (6 children)
I know i should not reply to this...
But it's early morning here and i cannot stand such a douchebag.
Come on man, MDC is a decent human being, probably more than you.
(Well i don't know him personally, but i did come to like some of his posts)
Keep your ciabatta closed, some mosquitoes might get inside and like it.
Coding is an art. No, java is not coding. Yes, i am biased, i know, sorry if this bothers you.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 27 2018, @06:24AM (5 children)
Some people/trolls are just "broken", and are unlikely to get "better". And it looks like the horses can tell.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Friday April 27 2018, @11:41AM (4 children)
It just seems like the proportion of posts of that type have increased over, say, the last year.
When the standard response for someone disagreeing is to call the parent a "dumb ass", it makes me sad for the state of the site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @01:55PM
Most animals can determine who jerks are, and either stay away from them, or try to bite them.
It's illegal for most civilized folks to bite a jerk, and running away doesn't help as it just makes the runners lose ground.
Forums either encourage the activity because of the conflict that many people enjoy to witness, or even pile on in an us-versus-other fight, or the more tolerant types that want to keep the walls clean of mud can try to stamp it out while trying to ignore the ignorant cries of censorship and freedom of speech.
It's too bad we can't just change the music on the jukebox to get rid of the customers we don't want that sit around taking up seats and just drinking the free refills and heckling people that arrive that are not like them, denying us of more valuable contributions. It's too bad so many people are uncomfortable with people that aren't just like them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @04:29PM (2 children)
This sort of thing has always been present and always will be present. If you are just noticing it now, and it offends you, you should check your hydration, take some vitamins, maybe take a walk.
A site (or an internet) without all the 'dumbass-esque' comments is not the internet of a free people.
When something becomes sanitized (or civilized), you know it has become the enemy of freedom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @10:00PM (1 child)
There are degrees of freedom. You apparently want 100% anarchy with no rules. Hell, even on this site you can't post more than once every 60 seconds and TMB at one point put some regex to thwart a troll and it impacted legit posts as well.
Personally I will 100% take today's modern civilization over the feudal / slave dominated periods of history. I will 100% prefer to read Reddit (bleh) over Voat (fucking awful) and I do not feel I am missing out on anything. Some rules are necessary and each community has to develop their own rules which keep their community on point.
Does removing pornographic posts, illegal content, or filtering common racist terms mean a site is an enemy of freedom? What if you are allowed to discuss all sorts of racist ideas as long as you didn't use racist identifiers? I would argue that none of those items make something an enemy of freedom by default, it depends on how the community is managed.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Saturday April 28 2018, @02:37AM
Define what is pornographic or obscene, and what is just in bad taste ? What to some is a racist term is just common language to others, it is all in the intent and the interpretation.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/maroon [merriam-webster.com]
or
https://www.colorpsychology.org/maroon/ [colorpsychology.org]
I'd rather endure and moderate the trolls than censor anything. Are Cherubs art or examples of pedophilia ?
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge