Dr Michelle Dickinson: nanotechnologist on the new study revealing goats might be smarter than expected

When most people think of animals that understand human communication, dogs usually come to mind. But according to a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, goats may deserve a place on that list too. Researchers discovered that goats can use the direction of a human voice to locate hidden food. This is a sophisticated skill previously demonstrated in dogs and human babies, but not even consistently in chimpanzees, our closest living relatives.  Animals constantly use sounds to gather information about the world around them. Human babies can follow the direction of a person's voice to find objects, even when they cannot see the speaker. Domestic dogs can do this too. Surprisingly, previous experiments found that chimpanzees generally struggle with the task. The new study asked a simple question: can goats do it? Researchers worked with 29 adult goats. A large wooden screen was placed in a testing area, with a red bucket positioned at each end. One bucket contained a food reward, the other was empty. The goats could see the buckets but could not see the researcher hidden behind the screen.  The researchers ran three different conditions to determine exactly what information the goats were using.  1. Reward-directed speech. The hidden researcher placed food in one bucket and then sat closer to the empty bucket. If the goats simply walked toward the source of the voice, they would choose incorrectly.  Instead, the researcher turned their head and body toward the bucket containing food and enthusiastically said "Oh look, look there, this is great!"  2. No speech control. In the second condition, everything was identical except the researcher remained completely silent. This tested whether goats might simply be smelling the food.  3. Non-deward-directed speech control. In the third condition, the researcher spoke exactly as before, but deliberately faced away from both buckets. The voice was present, but it provided no useful directional information. If goats were truly using voice direction, their performance should fall back to chance levels.  Each goat completed four trials in every condition, giving researchers a total of 12 tests per animal. The goats performed best when the direction of the voice pointed toward the food. The goats performed no better than chance when the researcher stayed silent so they were not finding the food by smell. When speech was present but carried no directional information, success again dropped to chance levels, showing that it was specifically the direction of the voice that mattered. One of the most intriguing aspects of the study is how the goats compare with other species tested using the same experimental design. Human infants succeed roughly 80 percent of the time. Dogs succeed around 63 percent of the time. Chimpanzees generally fail to perform above chance.   The goats' performance was remarkably similar to that of domestic dogs. Interestingly, the researcher spoke German during the experiment, even though the goats lived in England. That means the animals were not responding to the meaning of the words themselves. They were using the direction of the voice, not the language being spoken.   For an animal often stereotyped as stubborn or simple, that's a remarkable achievement.  LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.