1.5-minute read

How would you rate your facial recognition skills—excellent, or fair-to-middling? Perhaps you’re in the rare category of super-recognizers that can memorize and recall thousands of faces after a fleeting glance. Or maybe you’re more of an out-of-sight, out-of-mind observer of your fellow humans. And how do you think your facial recall abilities stack up against members of the animal kingdom?

According to neuroscience researchers at the University of Cambridge, most people can recognize familiar faces within milliseconds and identify unfamiliar faces after repeat viewings. We share our ability to remember familiar faces of our kind with chimpanzees, rhesus macaques, cattle, pigeons, goats, honeybees, and sheep. Some animals, including dogs, horses, and sheep, can also distinguish familiar faces from other species. You may be interested to learn that when it comes to remembering unknown faces, our wooly farmyard friends have advanced facial recognition abilities that rival those of humans and non-human primates.

While sheep were known to have the ability to identify faces of flock members and familiar people from photographs, the Cambridge research found that female Welsh Mountain Sheep could also learn to recognize unfamiliar faces in photos. After repeat exposure, the sheep in the study were able to identify Barack Obama, Emma Watson, Jake Gyllenhaal, and newsreader Fiona Bruce from a two-dimensional image. Unless they were covertly flipping through tabloids back at the barn, the cloven-hoofed herbivores’ recall of people they’d never interacted with is pretty darn impressive. The clever creatures were also able to recognize a familiar or unfamiliar face in a photograph even when presented from a different perspective, an ability that was previously only known in humans.

So, the next time you come across a flock of sheep in your travels, don’t let their placid faces fool you. There’s more going on behind those cud-chewing exteriors than meets the eye. Do ewes remember you? Don’t be surprised if they do.

Btw, if you never forget a face—any face—and think you may have exceptional recognition abilities, you can take this Scientific American quiz to find out if you qualify as a super-recognizer.