Topic > Memories of positive and negative experiences in horses

Latest scientific studies have shown that, even in a short-term encounter, horses can still remember a place where they had a positive or negative experience. Horses will subsequently show different emotions every time they move to the place where they once had an experience. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Whenever you see that your horse seems worried, with some sort of somersault, stop forcing him to that place you are going to without thinking about the fact that your horse may have connected that particular place with a bad event and negative feelings. The emotional state created by your horse's experience will take a notable role in training your horses, experience is a main issue that must be considered when training horses. When training your horse, you cannot simply accept that where you are training your horses has no impact on your horses. horses has no effect on horses. In fact, the impact of the effect could be significant. Note that what a horse has experienced in a specific place leaves traces that last much longer than you might think. The next time you work horses there you will see the impact on the way he learns. If he has encountered more positive events in that place, he will have a more adaptable and moldable behavior that will better adapt to what you ask of him. In any case, on the other hand, if he had had a negative or even stressful experience in that place, he might have been more rigid in his training and less able to adapt to the task. The researchers tested cognitive flexibility, the ability to adapt learning to new and changing situations by allowing 35 mares to experience negative, positive and neutral events in specific stalls that were easy to distinguish from other stalls (by sight or sounds in each stall). The negative experience was water suddenly pouring into the barn, a ball suddenly being thrown inside the barn, a sound suddenly being played, a sheet being shaken right before the barn. The positive experience was the distribution of food. The neutral experience would be nothing that they specifically experienced. Then, they separated the horses into three groups, negative experience, positive experience, and neutral experience. Each group of horses returned to the stable associated with that experience, where they would undergo a new learning session. But this time the horses waited in the stable without any positive or negative experiences occurring. In the new learning session, they taught each mare to find the food hidden under the traffic cone indicated by a handler. In the "extinction" phase of learning, they then removed the hidden food and observed how many times the mare would continue to touch the right cone even when the food was gone. In any case, they found that horses in the positive experience group stopped collecting cones much faster than the alternative groups once the cone collection was finished. They were quicker to recognize that the situation had changed and that there was no motivation to continue collecting cones if there was nothing to collect. In contrast, horses that had been trained in a stable where they had a negative experience continued to pick up the cone. Horses that had learned in an environment where they had had previous positive experiences were more flexible, meaning they were better able to adapt their behavior to the situation..