3rd Assignment

Translation

A Chimpanzee can recognize faces just as well as humans 

The skill may have been acquired from our common ancestors.

A human can recognize faces faster and in a different way than other objects. Earlier, that skill had been viewed as inclusive only to humans, but now we know that chimpanzees also recognize faces with human-like efficiency. 

This new information emerged when Japanese Masaki Tomonaga and Tomiko Imura taught three female chimpanzees to find cars, bananas, and faces, for example among other pictures. The Chimps noticed their peers faster than other pictures.

A face that is upside-down isn't seen

For humans, facial-recognition is based on the whole picture and fast perceiving, and the same can seemingly be said about chimpanzees. Just like humans, the chimps recognized faces noticeably worse when the picture was turned upside-down. The covering of the eyes, nose and the face also slowed down the performance.

Instead, turning the pictures black and white didn't affect the facial-recognition. 

What gave the researchers trouble, was the chimps finding pictures of bananas among other objects as fast as that of a face. However, the fast recognition of the fruit wasn't the same as noticing a face amongst the bigger picture. And when the pictures were turned black and white, the bananas disappeared for the chimps. The treat was easily recognized by the color yellow.

The chimps' ability to recognize faces shows its close relation to humans.

The human beats a macaque

Surprisingly enough, the chimps recognized the human faces as easily as those of their own species. That however, was easily explained: the test-animals had been spending a lot of time with their care-givers, humans. The faces of the macaque were weakly distinguished, although they lived in the neighboring cages. Even the faces of human babies were picked out more easily than the macaque, although the chimps having never made contact with the babies.

Were it the faces of humans or those of the same species, the chimps noticed the pictures that were taken from straight forward better than those taken from the profile. Which indicates that eye-contact is one of the factors that raises the chimps awareness. The same can be said about humans.

''These results should be remembered when discussing the progress of social awareness. Both of these species might make use of the information the face offers in their social lives similarly,'' estimates Tomonaga, who works at the primate research institution at the University of Kyoto.

The research was published by Scientific Reports.