12.2018 | THE SCIENTIST 15ALAN MCELLIGOTT
faces (Biol Lett, 12:20150907), remem-
bered the expressions they’d seen earlier
in the day when exposed to the same per-
son (Curr Biol, 28:P1428–32.E4, 2018).
“There’s been lots of scientific research in
other ways dogs and horses can pick up
on human body language,” says Leanne
Proops, an animal behavior researcher at
the University of Portsmouth in the UK
and a coauthor on the horse studies.
Why these animals should dis-
cern humans’ emotional expressions is
unknown. One possibility is that domes-
tication has shaped the ability. Dogs and
horses have been bred as companions of
our species for thousands of years. Accord-
ing to Jérôme Micheletta, an animal behav-
iorist at the University of Portsmouth who
was not involved in the studies, goats too
have a history with humans. “They were not
selected for being friendly or being particu-
larly responsive to human signals,” he says,
“but that doesn’t mean [their domestica-
tion] didn’t have an effect on their ability
to understand human signals.”
Still, without research on wild ani-
mals, or on young individuals that have
had limited interactions with humans,
“it’s very difficult to say” whether domes-
tication is a prerequisite for recognizing
human expressions and other emotional
signals, Proops says. “The other option is
that it’s not domestication; it’s just some-
thing about dogs or something about
horses, whether they’re wild or domestic,
that makes them good at this sort of abil-
ity, and that’s maybe why they got domes-
ticated.... It would be good to do some
follow-up studies that get at that.”
Also unclear is the extent to which ani-
mals are capable of understanding human
emotional expressions more deeply. “They
can discriminate between whether we’re
happy or angry in facial expressions, but the
extent to which they actually have some sort
of empathy is a big question that remains,”
Proops says. “We’re only just starting to delve
into recognition of emotions in animals.”When it comes to goats, research
into these questions could have implica-
tions for the animals’ treatment. Specifi-
cally, Micheletta wants to know how goats
react to photos of different emotional
expressions. “What would be interesting to
find out is what kind of effect these facial
expressions have on their behavior and
their physiology,” he says. “We could imag-
ine that if they were confronted [with]
angry farmers or workers, then potentially
they would be more stressed, and that per-
haps would have negative implications in
terms of welfare and productivity.”Even without these answers, Mc-
Elligott is hopeful that the demonstra-
tion of goats’ emotional intelligence will
be enough to start improving welfare
guidelines. “Generally there is a wide-
spread public perception of livestock...
as being not particularly clever,” he says.
This mentality has contributed to the
transport of live cattle, sheep, and goats
between far-flung regions of the world,
McElligott says, with the animals being
kept in cramped conditions on ships for
weeks at a time. “Ultimately our overallgoal is to improve perceptions of these
species so that people really understand
the behaviors... and therefore might
actually treat them a bit better.”
—Jef AkstPay Attention
Driving a car is a complex task for a brain
to coordinate. A driver may drink a cup
of coffee and have a conversation with a
passenger, all while safely piloting a vehi-
cle through traffic. But all of this activity
requires attention—that is, concentrating
on the tasks and sources of information
that matter and blocking out those that
don’t. How the brain manages that orches-
tration is a long-standing scientific mystery.
One prominent view, based on findings
from human behavioral studies, is that the
brain guides us through a world chock-full
of sensory inputs by focusing a metaphor-
ical spotlight on what it deems impor-
tant, while filtering out relatively trivial
details. Unlike some other, functionally
well-defined aspects of cognition, this
attentional spotlight has eluded scien-
tific understanding. Its neural substrates
have been particularly difficult to pin
down to specific activities and locations
in the brain—although several studies
have implicated the frontoparietal net-
work, which spans the frontal and pari-
etal lobes of the brain.
Meanwhile, attention studies involv-
ing visual tasks that require continuous
focus—detecting a small object flashing
on a cluttered computer screen, for exam-
ple—have shown that task performance
varies over short time intervals, with epi-
sodes of peak performance and of poor
performance alternating on millisecond
timescales. Such research suggests that
the attentional spotlight might not be as
constant as once thought. Yet, until now,
researchers have not been able to directly
connect these changes in performance to
fluctuations in brain activity.
To get some answers, Sabine Kast-
ner, a cognitive neuroscientist at Princ-
eton University, and colleagues recently
conducted two studies to investigate howThe goats did seem to take
the time to have a look at
these photographs.
—Alan McElligott,
University of RoehamptonHAPPY GOAT LUCKY: Animal behavior
researcher Alan McElligott hopes his team’s
work will lead to better treatment for goats
and other livestock.