Assignment 5

A chimpanzee recognizes the face as well as a human does

The skill may be inherited from mutual ancestors.

A human recognizes the face sooner and in a different way from other shapes. This has earlier been thought to only be a quality of ours but it has now turned out that also chimpanzees observe faces humanlikely efficient. 

The matter became clear when the Japanese Masaki Tomonaga ja Tomoko Imura taught 3 female chimps to look for example cars, bananas and faces among other pictures. 

Upside down the face does not show up

For human the face recognition is based on perceiving the big picture quickly and that seems to apply for chimps as well. 

Just like humans, chimpanzees did perceive faces considerably worse when turning the picture upside down. Also covering eyes, nose and mouth slowed down performance. Instead changing the picture into black and white didn't disrupt recognizing a face. 

The chimpanzees found faces as quickly as bananas from a bunch of pictures, which gave the researchers a headache. However, the quick noticing of a fruit wasn't about the same kind of perceiving the big picture as in face recognition. 

When the pictures were replaced into black and white, the bananas became invisible as if they disappeared. Easy recognition of the fruit was due to the yellow color.  

Human beats makaki 

Surprisingly chimps spotted human faces as sensitively as their own species' face. The phenomenon could hardly be explained only by that test animals have been socializing a lot with their caretakers. They recognized the Japanese macaque's faces poorly even though this spieces of monkeys live right next to their cages. The chimpanzees reacted more quickly to human babies' faces than to the macaques's faces even without meeting the babies before.
Was it either about the human or the members of the same species, the chimps spotted faces better from pictures taken in front of the faces than the faces which were pictured from the side. This refers to that eye contact is one thing of which brings the face into chimps' consciousness. Similar to this has been observed on human.
"These results are worth taking into consideration while thinking about the improvement of social intelligence. Both of the species might utilize the information passed by faces in their social lives in a similar way," Tomonag, who works in Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute, estimates in his research bulletin.
The research was published by Scientific Reports.