Face it: Sheep are just like us when it comes to recognizing people
In facial-recognition tests, the animals picked images of familiar faces over pictures of strangers
DOUBLE TAKE Scientists trained sheep to recognize pictures of celebrity faces, and showed that the animals have advanced, face-processing abilities similar to those of humans.
Kate Travis
Emma Watson, Jake Gyllenhaal, journalist Fiona Bruce and Barack Obama all walk into a sheep pen. No, this isn’t the beginning of a baaa-d joke.
By training sheep using pictures of these celebrities, researchers from the University of Cambridge discovered that the animals are able to recognize familiar faces from 2-D images. Given a choice, the sheep picked the familiar celebrity’s face over an unfamiliar face the majority of the time, the researchers report November 8 in Royal Society Open Science.
Even when a celeb’s face was slightly tilted rather than face-on, the sheep still picked the image more often than not. That means the sheep were not just memorizing images, demonstrating for the first time that sheep have advanced face-recognition capabilities similar to those of humans and other primates, say
