AUTHOR=Bellegarde Lucille G. A. , Erhard Hans W. , Weiss Alexander , Boissy Alain , Haskell Marie J. TITLE=Valence of Facial Cues Influences Sheep Learning in a Visual Discrimination Task JOURNAL=Frontiers in Veterinary Science VOLUME=4 YEAR=2017 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2017.00188 DOI=10.3389/fvets.2017.00188 ISSN=2297-1769 ABSTRACT=
Sheep are one of the most studied farm species in terms of their ability to process information from faces, but little is known about their face-based emotion recognition abilities. We investigated (a) whether sheep could use images of sheep faces taken in situation of varying valence as cues in a simultaneous discrimination task and (b) whether the valence of the situation affects their learning performance. To accomplish this, we photographed faces of sheep in three situations inducing emotional states of neutral (ruminating in the home pen) or negative valence (social isolation or aggressive interaction). Sheep (