The humble sheep could have ability to recognise familiar human faces

November 10, 2017

New research led by a New Zealander could help tackle a currently –incurable disease.

It turns out the ubiquitous New Zealand farm animal - sheep - could have the ability to recognise familiar human faces.

Research led by a New Zealander at England's Cambridge University could also tackle a currently-incurable disease.

"We found that sheep can be taught to recognise a face from a photograph which is an advanced skill, so we train them on a number of different photographs," says Jenny Morton, Professor of Neurobiology.

Sheep in the study could pick out the familiar faces 80 per cent of the time with food pellets as a reward.

Even at an angle, the animals were able to identify the correct picture of a familiar face more often than not.

"So had they just been memorising the images, or recognising the pictures, they should've gone back to a 50-50 chance of getting the tilted angles, but they didn't," says Ms Morton.

"They performed significantly above chance and actually in a way with a performance drop that is similar to that seen in humans."

The flock on the university's farm have already been taught to recognise shapes, numbers and letters.

Half of the flock have been given the gene for the currently-incurable Huntington's disease.

Two of the disease's symptoms are the ability to make decisions or recognise faces.

"These two choice discrimination tasks with the faces was actually a way of measuring cognitive function in the sheep we want to compare the normal sheep with the Huntington's disease sheep."

Potential for more progress in the medical field.

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