This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Here's one of the stranger celebrity sightings out there.

Researchers have confirmed that sheep can recognize the actors Emma Watson and Jake Gillenhall.

Yeah, I think it's very cool.

Jennifer Morton is a neurobiologist at the University of Cambridge.

The reason we chose the celebrities because we're sure they'd never met these people. The experiment worked like this.

First, Morton's team trained eight sheep

to recognize the famous faces.

And the sheep correctly chose the celebrities face

over a stranger's 80% of the time.

Next they presented faces at a slight angle.

The sheep got only two-thirds of those right,

but that's about on par with how human performance dips for the same task, proving that sheep have advanced

facial recognition skills, the scientists say, comparable to humans or our primate cousins.

The studies in the journal of Royal Society open science.

If you're wondering why sheep...

Sheaps toes me rather than the other way round.

There's a good model of Huntington's disease in sheep,

so Morton says studying cognitive tests like facial recognition in sheep and the corresponding decline in those abilities in Huntington's sheep might offer insights into the human condition too.

Thanks for listening. For Scientific American 60 Second Science, I'm Christopher and D'Anyata.