Can Ponies Distinguish Human Facial Expressions?

As hypothesised, the angry and sad faces resulted in the ponies looking at the actors more often with their left eye first. The left eye glance corresponds with the right brain, which is in charge of processing negative stimuli. Conversely, the ponies more often looked at the joyous expression with their right eye, and interestingly the neutral facial expression came up with a 50/50 reaction! 

I think it’s important to note that although the horses did respond to the different facial expressions and they clearly distinguish between them, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they understand what we’re feeling or that they feel what we feel,” says Merkies. “They may respond more to an angry face but that doesn’t mean that they feel your anger and that there are other things taken into consideration, like the way that you move your body and what else is happening in the environment.”    

Merkies sums up, “Many different cues factor into how a horse will respond in any moment, but understanding our facial expression is important to social interactions. It’s interesting that facial expressions are highly conserved across species, so even though we can have very different physiognomy (we look very different) — for example, a mouse compared to a horse, compared to a human — facial expressions are fairly similar, which is very interesting and very helpful because if you can understand the facial expression from another being or another species, then you can know how to respond appropriately.”