AAll of your questions are fascinating — they and similar questions are at the heart of a relatively new field of academic study known as animal cognition. Just how do animals process information from the environment around them? How complex are their mental images or conceptualizations of situations? Over the last few years, the systematic study of animal cognition has become one of the hot topics in comparative psychology in general. While it’s not easy to find much scientific research on the horse, there is a little older work and some that’s fairly recent.

Early work on horse cognitive and learn-ing abilities included classic studies of perception, simple pattern discrimination (triangles, squares, circles), maze learning, and memory. There is a great article published in 1990 by Cindy McCall, PhD, who is now at Auburn University (Journal of Animal Science Volume 68, pages 75-81). That paper reviews the work with horses up until 1990.

Some of these abilities could be ex-plained as simple stimulus-response, associative learning. That really requires very little higher cognitive ability that would fit the definition of "thinking." So while both horses and humans use those skills to learn and respond to their environment, the questions remained about how complexly horses think or understand.

Nonetheless, the simple learning and perception research is very interesting. Most people find it fun to know what horses can do and how they compare to people or to pigeons, rats, dogs, or dolphins