Data of the Horse touch panel study published in Animals in 2022

This is the dataset of the article published in Animals in 2022. The present study used a touchscreen system to study the visual perception of Garrano horses, an endangered breed of pony belonging to the Iberian horse family. The participant horses (13, 8, 5, 4, and 2 years old) were kept as a one-male unit (OMU), living together permanently in an enriched environment near their natural habitat in Serra d’Arga, northern Portugal. Through successive training stages, all five horses acquired the skill of nose touch. All horses except the male learned to discriminate five letters of the alphabet, namely O, B, Z, V, and X. The error patterns and the analysis of shape features showed that the curved letters, O and B, look similar to the horses, as do the straight-line letters, Z, V, and X. The result is congruent with previous studies of shape perception in other animals. Because of the nature of the automated system, the touchscreen discrimination was free from social cueing known as the “Clever Hans phenomenon”. Without a lead rope, the horse participated in the visual cognition task presented by the touchscreen system. This is a pilot study for horses to freely start and engage the cognitive tests and to freely stop and return to the social group.