Horses show individual level lateralisation when inspecting an unfamiliar and unexpected stimulus.

ABSTRACT: Animals must attend to a diverse array of stimuli in their environments. The emotional valence and salience of a stimulus can affect how this information is processed in the brain. Many species preferentially attend to negatively valent stimuli using the sensory organs on the left side of their body and hence the right hemisphere of their brain. Here, we investigated the lateralisation of visual attention to the rapid appearance of a stimulus (an inflated balloon) designed to induce an avoidance reaction and a negatively valent emotional state in 77 Italian saddle horses. Horses' eyes are laterally positioned on the head, and each eye projects primarily to the contralateral hemisphere, allowing eye use to be a proxy for preferential processing in one hemisphere of the brain. We predicted t

SUBMITTER: Baragli P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8341651 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature