Watch this sheep get trained to recognize human faces.

What’s different about this experiment compared to previous experiments is that this group of researchers has shown that sheep can recognize faces even when they’re tilted at various different angles. It suggests that sheep have a more nuanced, abstract understanding of facial structure than once thought. Even though sheep’s aptitude decreased for the tilted images, the amount of decline is actually similar to the equivalent decline between humans’ ability to recognize frontward versus tilted faces.

If Jenny Morton, a neurobiologist at the University of Cambridge, hadn’t bought these eight sheep seven years ago from a truck on its way to a slaughterhouse, the small flock would likely be dead. But now, they’re guinea pigs for Huntington’s disease research. Morton says that the finding shows that facial recognition is a complex brain process—and that sheep, which have large brains with a structure similar to humans’, could help elucidate the process.

The research is important not just for Huntington’s disease (which involves loss of facial recognition capabilities), but other conditions and disorders in which face identification is more difficult. And of course, the more we learn about facial recognition, the better we can develop surveillance technologies that can keep us safe.

Photo credit: Michael Palmer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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