Can AI teach us how animals think?

How is an animal feeling at a given moment? Humans have long recognised certain well-known behaviour-like a cat hissing as a warning, but in many cases we’ve had little clue of what’s going on inside an animal’s head.

Now we have a better idea, thanks to a Milan-based researcher who has developed an AI model that he claims can detect whether their calls express positive or negative emotions.

Stavros Ntalampiras’s deep-learning model, which was published in Scientific Reports, can recognise emotional tones across seven species of hoofed animals,…