Assignment 3

Chimpanzee recognises a face like humans

The skill is probably inherited from common ancestors.

A human perceives faces faster and differently than other figures. Earlier it was thought to be only our quality, but now the studies has revealed that also chimpanzees can notice faces like humans can. They found it out when two Japanese scientists Masaki Tomonaga and Tomoko Imura taught three female chimpanzees to find for example cars, bananas and faces from other pictures. They found the faces faster than other images.

The face won't show upside-down

The recognation of faces for human is based on fast understanding of the whole picture and it seems it's the same for chimpanzees. Just like humans, chimpanzees didn't recognise the picture that well when it was turned upside-down. Also covering eyes, nose and mouth slowed the performance down. Turning the image black and white did not affect the chimpanzees.
The scientists noticed that chimpanzees recognised bananas as fast as faces. The fast noticing of the fruit wasn't the same that with faces. When they turned banana-photos black and white the fruits kind of disappeared. So the chimpanzees recognised bananas because of their yellow color.

Human beats macaque

Suprisingly the chimpanzees found human face as fast as the face of the same species. The phenomenon isn't only because test animals have been in touch with their caretakers so much. They didn't find Japanese macaque's faces even though there's that species right next to chimpanzee cage. Chimpanzees reacted faster to human baby faces even they never met a baby before. No matter if it was humans or the sam species, the chimpanzees recognised faces better from the front view than side profile pictures. It points at the fact that eye-contact is a one reason that lifts the faces to chimpanzee's consciousness. The same has been noticed for humans.
"These results should be considered when thinkng about social improvement. Both of the species could use the information of the faces in social life." Tomonaga, who studies in  Kioto university of order Primates institute says. The investigation was published by Scientific Reports.