Copyright 2001 by Erik Lesser Copyright 2001 by Erik Lesser Horse Learning research from Professor Emeritus Frank A. Logan Doctor Logan is co-author of the landmark book Reward and Punishment , a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of New Mexico, and the former chairman of the Yale University Department of Psychology. Professor Logan is currently building a database of the Laws of Learning . It does appear that some breeds are better than others, that young is better than old, and that distributed training is better than highly massed. The current topic in animal learning is to take into consideration the species-specific responses in the animals' niche in nature. For example, rats are good at running mazes and pigeons are good at pecking.
Rats are good at auditory tasks, pigeons at visual tasks.
But those data typically are restricted to a particular type of task. For example, when a monkey first learns a simple discrimination, it may take many trials. But as it is given more and more discrimination learning tasks with different objects, it eventually learns to solve such problems in a single trial. In the human learning literature, there is lots of evidence for positive transfer, which includes a general factor associated simply with the learning context in addition to a specific factor concerning the task at hand. In your case, for example, the horse has to learn that there is something it can do to control your behavior, and that emitting responses of some kind is appropriate.