Cows react to human emotions displayed in videos and use this information to guide subsequent interaction choices

The ability to perceive and interpret emotions from others provides clear evolutionary advantages for social animals. Domestic animals live in close contact with humans, making human emotional cues particularly relevant for them. Understanding how these animals recognise, memorise, and respond to human emotional signals is therefore crucial to investigating their cognitive capacities and their active role in interspecific social interactions. Thus, this study investigates whether cows can discriminate between human expressions and use this information to guide their behaviour in a subsequent choice test. Thirty-nine cows were shown two 30-second videos: one of an experimenter expressing joy and another expressing anger through facial and vocal cues. Afterward, both experimenters simultaneously presented themselves to the cows in a choice test. During video exposure, cows looked longer at the anger video and showed a left-eye bias, suggesting right-hemisphere processing of negatively valenced stimuli. They also displayed more behaviours indicative of a negative perception. In the subsequent choice test, cows spent significantly more time close to the experimenter who had previously expressed joy. These results demonstrate that cows can discriminate and remember human emotional expressions and use this information to guide their choices in future social interactions. This highlights their role as active participants rather than passive observers in interspecific relationships, and provides insight into contexts where such abilities may be expressed, with potential implications for enhancing human-animal relationships and welfare.