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Brief Communications

Nature 414, 165-166 (8 November 2001) | doi:10.1038/35102669

There is a Corrigendum (17 May 2007) associated with this document.

Open Innovation Challenges

Sheep don't forget a face

Keith M. Kendrick1, Ana P. da Costa1, Andrea E. Leigh1, Michael R. Hinton1 & Jon W. Peirce1

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The discovery of a remarkable memory shows that sheep are not so stupid after all.

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The human brain has evolved specialized neural mechanisms for visual recognition of faces, which afford us a remarkable ability to discriminate between, remember and think about many hundreds of different individuals. Sheep also recognize1, 2, 3, 4 and are attracted to1, 5 individual sheep and humans by their faces, as they possess similar specialized neural systems in the temporal and frontal lobes for assisting in this important social task6, 7, including a greater involvement of the right brain hemisphere3, 7. Here we show that individual sheep can remember 50 other different sheep faces for over 2 years, and that the specialized neural circuits involved maintain selective encoding of individual sheep and human faces even after long periods of separation.