Degree project - Looking forward to human interactions?

The aim of this project is to provide robust indicators of how horses express positive as well as negative emotions at the human-horse interface. In particular, we want to study how horses anticipate experimentally induced events of different valence and arousal level.

This study will be carried out at Agroscope, the Swiss National Stud Farm during summer 2021. We are offering three student projects as part of this study:

Evaluating horses’ emotional expressions (e.g., facial expressions, behaviour, place preference) as related to the anticipation of different experimental situations based on video material
Evaluation reactivity and arousal levels before, during and after presentation of different events based on heart rate recordings
Evaluating horses’ temperament and reactions to human contact prior to testing based on video material and score sheets

There is the possibility for a student to join our team and help collecting data at Agroscope.