Response to 'Sheep recognize familiar and unfamiliar human faces from two-dimensional images'

Abstract

The comment by Towler et al. [1] questioning Knolle, Goncalves and Morton's [2] claims that their findings represent evidence for sheep having advanced human-like face-recognition abilities makes some good points, and the limited number of animals involved and face stimuli together with the lack of direct comparisons between sheep and humans clearly make conclusions based only on their experiments somewhat preliminary. However, the main contribution of the original paper is to provide further evidence that sheep possess an expert face-recognition ability that has some similarities with that of humans [2]. As such, it builds upon a large body of previous behavioural and neural evidence for face-recognition expertise in sheep, including involvement of the temporal cortex and right hemisphere dominance, produced over a period of over 30 years and which is not fully discussed [3]. There are some key points that both the original paper and the comment by Towler et al. might have considered.