Sheep trained to recognize Jake Gyllenhaal, for science
Sheep can be trained to recognize celebrities like Barack Obama and Jake Gyllenhaal, new research shows.
A University of Cambridge study found that sheep can learn to recognize human faces. The results were published Wednesday in the Royal Society's Open Science journal as part of research looking into cognitive ability and neurodegenerative disorders, like Huntington's disease, which can impair people's ability to recognize facial emotion.
Researchers consider facial recognition as one of the most important human social skills. Sheep are known for their sociability, but this showed -- with some training -- the sheep could not only recognize fellow sheep and humans they knew, but process images of faces.
“We’ve shown with our study that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities, comparable with those of humans and monkeys," lead study author Jenny Morton said.
The study trained eight sheep to recognize four celebrity faces: Jake Gyllenhaal, Barack Obama, Emma Watson, and Fiona Bruce (it was a British study). These faces were put up on screens and the sheep were rewarded with food for picking the photograph of the correct celebrity displayed in a pen.
Then the sheep were shown two photographs: one of the celebrity and a random face. Eight times out 10 the sheep picked the celebrity.
In a separate test, researchers wanted to see if the sheep would recognize human trainers they already know without any training like they underwent in the pen with the celebrity faces.
When the handler's face was shown, sheep picked it seven out of 10 times.
Maybe "sheeple" isn't such an insult.
Topics Animals Facial Recognition
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
