No evidence of spatial representation of age, but “own-age bias” like face processing found in chimpanzees

Previous studies have revealed that non-human primates can differentiate the age category of faces. However, the knowledge about age recognition in non-human primates is very limited and whether non-human primates can process facial age information in a similar way to humans is unknown. As humans ha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Animal cognition 2022-04, Vol.25 (2), p.415-424
Main Authors: Kawaguchi, Yuri, Tomonaga, Masaki, Adachi, Ikuma
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Animals
Behavioral Sciences
Bias
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Chimpanzees
Conspecifics
Developmental stages
Face
Facial Recognition
Humans
Infants
Information processing
Life Sciences
Matching-to-sample
Original Paper
Pan troglodytes - physiology
Pattern recognition
Primates
Psychology Research
Reaction Time
Recognition, Psychology - physiology
Representations
Response time
Stimuli
Zoology
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Summary:Previous studies have revealed that non-human primates can differentiate the age category of faces. However, the knowledge about age recognition in non-human primates is very limited and whether non-human primates can process facial age information in a similar way to humans is unknown. As humans have an association between time and space (e.g., a person in an earlier life stage to the left and a person in a later life stage to the right), we investigated whether chimpanzees spatially represent conspecifics’ adult and infant faces. Chimpanzees were tested using an identical matching-to-sample task with conspecific adult and infant face stimuli. Two comparison images were presented vertically (Experiment 1) or horizontally (Experiment 2). We analyzed whether the response time was influenced by the position and age category of the target stimuli, but there was no evidence of correspondence between space and adult/infant faces. Thus, evidence of the spatial representation of the age category was not found. However, we did find that the response time was consistently faster when they discriminated between adult faces than when they discriminated between infant faces in both experiments. This result is in line with a series of human face studies that suggest the existence of an “own-age bias.” As far as we know, this is the first report of asymmetric face processing efficiency between infant and adult faces in non-human primates.
ISSN:1435-9448
1435-9456
DOI:10.1007/s10071-021-01564-7